The Korona Mushroom Association is one of Central Europe's leading mushroom industry groups, possessing the largest mushroom growing area in Hungary. The Association covers the entire mushroom production vertical, from mushroom spawn production through mushroom compost manufacturing and high-quality cultivation to the canning and processing operations. It is a supplier to Metro, Spar, Lidl, and Hofer grocery chains, among others.
Mushroom picking is currently carried out with the help of more than 400 employees, making the calculation of quantities, mushroom types, and yields a significant administrative burden. The picked quantities were often untraceable, nothing automatically signaled mushroom aging, and only the expertise and attentiveness of the workers could be relied upon to avoid having to discard larger quantities from the cold storage facilities. The quantities brought into warehouses were not tracked item by item, making it difficult to serve the customer demand for specific types from the existing system.
The development goal was to create a custom software solution capable of managing and accelerating the entire mushroom picking process, from recording picker personnel data through inventory movements to wage payments. Our custom-developed system uses barcode identification to track the entire lifecycle of picked mushrooms, measure picker performance, and prepare the documents required for payroll processing. Through item-level identification, warehouse quantities can be precisely tracked, and a notification system was developed to prevent product aging. The system handles nearly 30,000 barcodes daily, which includes generating codes and saving them to the database, printing (using high-performance label printers), scanning, identification, and saving the associated linking data to the database.
As a result of the software implementation, the company's administrative burdens and throughput times were significantly reduced, while measurement efficiency increased. The former Excel-based data management was completely eliminated during the process, with the software automatically performing all necessary calculations and operations. With the help of the reporting module, group leaders and company management can accurately measure results and determine employee performance, enabling them to make operational and strategic decisions based on objective data.
