West Gaines Seed Testimonial

West Gaines Seed, Inc & Americot 

Interviewing: Chiree Fields –  Chief Operating Officer & Jason Goelzer Chief Information Officer

West Gaines Seed & Americot.

Interviewer: Amy Doherty – Marketing Manager @ Primetics Seed Solutions

West Gaines Seed

“At West Gaines Seed, our commitment to our customers goes far beyond simply being a seed provider. Locally owned, and headquartered in Seminole, TX, with 10 locations in Texas, Arizona and Louisiana, we’re a leader for all your small grains and sorghum-sudangrass planting seed requirements, as well as offering full-service cotton seed production and processing.

Superior service, knowledgeable staff and more than 25 years in the seed business assures you that we will do everything we can to provide you the best experience when it comes to purchasing your planting seed.”

Americot

“Americot, Inc. is a leading cotton seed company focused on offering quality varieties with high yield potential and excellent fiber quality with technologies growers demand. At Americot, our priorities are simple: excellent performance, quality products, and exceptional people.

As an independent company, Americot is dedicated to working together with cotton growers throughout the Cotton Belt to provide elite performing varieties within the marketplace.”

How Generation Seed Management Software from Primetics Seed Solutions has helped us in a changing business landscape and enabled future expansion.

The business needed a software solution and partner to help us to adapt to a changing environment and to remove the reliance on using spreadsheets, allowing us to create robust business processes and information flow so that we would be able to operate more effectively.

“Prior to using Generation Seed Management Software, we were using a software platform that was not specifically designed for a seed business, which meant we were trying to manage everything via spreadsheets, this was very time consuming and inefficient. Some big changes that affected the cotton side of our business and the way cotton worked in the US was also changing and that presented some additional challenges. The existing platform and spreadsheets were not really going to support us going forward so we needed to change to something more robust for our current and future needs.”

Having a centralised seed management system helps manage our most important business data.

“There wasn’t anywhere to collect lab data and track seed lots when managing seed inventory in our previous platform. Our operation used to be run on spreadsheets and various access databases. We had to go through quite a lengthy process to find the data we were looking for and ensure right seed was available for shipping. Generation brings all the processes and data together and allows us to see everything in one place, which is a huge deal to us because now everyone has immediate access to the information they need.”

The comprehensive functionality available helped remove many manual, time-consuming processes.

“We needed to have the ability to use multiple levels of zone pricing. The flexible pricing tables in Generation really helped us quickly and accurately price orders.”

The software we needed had to be comprehensive enough to cover the whole business operation on one single platform.

“When we first started working with Primetics Seed Solutions, it was a big change across the whole business and a learning curve for us. The Generation software is so relational, everything is unified. It was exciting for us to see how everything connects and how it completely streamlined our processes. Generation allows us to do so much more in one place. As an example, contracting seed production acres with a grower, was based on word documents, filing documents on the hard drive and updating several spreadsheets, whereas now we can follow the entire process in our software and the production data is readily available.”

We recognised the value Generation could provide, and we worked with it to ensure that we got the maximum benefit.

“Our previous platform was one-dimensional. Moving to Generation at first was a huge change but we just had to understand how the software could work across the whole business to realise the value of it.”

It wasn’t just about the software, we also needed a partner we could work with.

“We have been working with Primetics Seed Solutions for 5 years now and the relationship with the team has been great. The Primetics team feel like an extension of our own. If we ever have any issues that need fixing quickly, or we have a new member who needs training, or we simply need to understand something further, the communication and responsiveness of the team allows us to keep things moving forward efficiently.”

Building on the solid foundations of Generation for our operational needs, Primetics Seed Solutions also closely collaborated with us to solve our reporting challenges by leveraging off the centralised data management provided by Generation. Primetics Seed Solution’s PETL product is a reporting/BI tool we added that has proved invaluable across our business.

“Before working with Primetics Seed Solutions, numerous people within the business spent hours compiling data for reporting, searching through files and spreadsheets on the hard drives, sending emails, waiting for access to the data. It became an onerous and longwinded task. Adding the PETL reporting module has saved us over 100-man hours a week, it is an absolute game changer. The way the data is used and exposed to us really helps us to make better business decisions. Now we can easily see what products need to be produced or removed etc. Our entire business structure is now completely different to how it used to be, from the way we exchange data between the companies to how we communicate and manage the business. PETL enables us to make huge business decisions based on accurate and up to date information. “

The collaboration with Primetics Seed Solutions did not end there. When they approached us with the idea for an Inventory Management App we immediately saw the value and jumped at the opportunity to work closely with the team to help create GenWARE to directly connect warehouse activity with the rest of our operations.

“Using GenWARE, has saved us a lot of manual time. Before we started using the app, the process from sending an order to physically getting it ready for shipping was very manual and time consuming, even when this was all being done within the same facility. GenWARE, has saved so much time and solved a lot of problems in the shipping process. It has removed the all the emails, calls and staff walking back and forth with paperwork. Our warehouse staff have easily adapted to the app, it is user friendly and well loved by the users.  Our next step is to roll out the app across our other warehouse locations. It has made a huge improvement to our warehouse processes and how we effectively communicate and update the deliveries internally, to our carriers and our customers.”

Selecting the right software and provider helped us achieve our business goals.

“Having both of our companies fit into Generation helped us to survive some really challenging times over the last 5 years, and more recently with COVID-19. If we didn’t have the data and the visibility across the businesses, we could not have made the business decisions that we have, the technology really helped us.”

We can rely on the Primetics team to help and support our business.

“The Primetics team understand us as a business and how everything works, they are always asking and looking for ways to help us be better, which is really appreciated and helps us all to be more collaborative.”

“The speed of the response is great and the turn-around is quick. We can go to the development team with our problems, and they are always there to put out the fires. Even on a different time zone, the team are so committed to helping and supporting us.”

We would absolutely recommend Primetics Seed Solutions

“Without Generation we would not be able to make the business decisions that we do. 5 years ago, we didn’t realise if it would work as well as it has, but without it we wouldn’t be where we are now. It has had a significant impact to the business, for the better. The people we work with at Primetics make the whole experience even better, everything is very personal, and we appreciate their willingness to make us better users of the software. We made the investment in the software and engaged with it to make sure we get the most benefit from that investment. We utilise Generation for all it can do.”

“How Generation works has been instrumental in making sure both of our businesses work together effectively.”