Background

A large, family-owned leader in precision ag tech/products and in market expansion services in the animal feed and specialty chemical industries. Their team of over 1000 field agents and consultants help farmers increase their crop yield.

Challenge

Field agents and crop consultants advise farmers about farming inputs and analyze over 40 farms per day. The agents needed to build and deliver recommendations quickly to farmers, but the lack of information and tedious processes were impacting their ability to report quickly and efficiently. 

In addition, the organization was using an external vendor and their product, but it was clear that the vendor was not agile enough to take new requirements and turn them around quickly. Although the functionality and ideas were originating directly from our client, the IP was being accumulated by the vendor. So, our client decided to build their own solution and partnered with our team to do so.

Solution

Our approach at Aditi is to listen first, act later. In order to prioritize the project and understand the requirements, we jumped into user research. And while our client initially wanted to prioritize web over mobile, it was clear from our research that mobile would yield greater results. Our team built a solution to map the field and identify the soil testing locations, and based on the soil testing, we were able to create a variable fertilizing plan. The plan software was then written to be fed to the equipment used by our client. 

The highlights: 

• Ideation to reality in 8 months
• Implemented Precision Agriculture trends 
• Data collection, analysis and report generation
• New product development cycle leveraging cloud, mobile, GIS, big data

Value Add 

Our team was able to deliver mobile and desktop applications to view the farms and heatmaps of soil composition, allowing agents to make credible recommendations on fertilizers to increase the crop yield. The inefficiencies and time spent on making recommendations were drastically reduced, allowing the agents to provide instant estimates for fertilization using variable fertilizers machinery. 

Aditi highlights: 

• MVP in eight months
• Enhancements and sustenance for six years
• 100+ team members onshore/offshore