Challenge
One of the largest agriculture companies in Northern Europe had a difficult time managing all their resources, stocks, fields, equipment and wages.
As their company and assets grew, so does the challenges to manage everything. Due to specific nuances in their field of work, it became impossible to manage everything efficiently using human labor. The company approached us with a difficult request to overhaul their entire processes using technology so most of the management work would be automated.
At first, we had to investigate their ways of work and propose our solution to them. Once they approved our proposal we started working on MVP to prove that this solution would be capable of improving efficiency.
“Horion Digital helped us to cut down expenses by up to 25% (YoY avg. -13%) by optimizing our asset portfolio, foregoing underperforming land and excessive machinery. Thanks to the platform they have developed and valuable business insights that it provided.”
Gediminas Norkevičius
IT director of Groward
- CLIENT
- Groward Group, UAB
- INDUSTRY
- Agriculture
- SERVICES
- IT Consultancy, Front-end & Back-end Development, Resource Management Optimization, ERP, ArcGIS
- PROJECT LINK
- Internal system – for more information, please contact us
Solution
Big data powered ERP system.
We have built from scratch an extensive application that gathers all the live data from machinery working in the fields, current stock levels of inventory, work that is being done by each individual employee. By gathering this data, the application improves the efficiency of workers by assigning them required tasks and tracking their performance.
By having all this data, it automatically calculates the compensations for workers. Also, it forecasts the time required to plow the fields and allows for easy tracking of changes when some new way of growing crops is implemented. Inventory tracking allows for timely purchases and planning.
Results
We have spent over a year investigating, developing and improving the application.
The result is the tool that solves their largest bottleneck – management, and allows the company to grow without further roadblocks in internal company resource management. Data gathered by the system allowed them to understand the most important business KPIs and change the administrative and accountancy bureaucratic system. This resulted in optimized expenses and helped them purify profitable agribusiness formula.
Defending Valuable Features
Before starting the project we have done a week-long design sprint with the client to map out all the requirements and approached the entire development process with Agile Scrum methodology.
A proactive communication culture was created with continuous daily delivery of key UX pillars like usage research findings, user stories & journey plans, platform map and wireframes. As a result, Groward Group uncovered new useful system features. These sessions helped to prevent any big project scope changes down the road.
A Powerful Tool
This system connects all agribusiness aspects. Internet Of Things (IoT) technology was used to connect all farming inventory.
Data is gathered live while work is being done in the fields or factories. Tractors, combine harvesters and other equipment GPS data is logged. The type of instruments and fertilizers that are used in a specific field are noted.
What is more, the system tracks the harvest that is being harvested and tracks it from the field to the laboratory. This allows to easily investigate specific fields of crop quality and compare it with the work that was done and resources used. Deriving the best ways to grow crops.
AgroMap also manages warehouses, resource purchases, stocks, bills, and consignments.
Additionally, the system can derive correct compensation for each field worker by taking into account not only time spent working but also their efficiency. Since GPS data is tracked and the efficiency metric can be easily calculated.
It also allows agronomists to plan, track in real time work progress, see farming machinery moving in the fields and if needed to make changes in planned work. Admin dashboard for agronomists shows finished work that must be approved. Once approved, the data is used to generate declarations and other documents needed by the business.
Rich Admin User Panel
Multiple iterations of admin panel have been done until the desired results of top company management were reached and they are happy about.
It’s a CEO’s dream to get all data about the company performance in one place. We made this dream come true. — Top company leaders have their own panel where they can track progress that is translated into currency values, see the most profitable cultures, fields, jobs. Thus they can base their business decisions accordingly.
Featured Technologies
There’s always more than meets the eye. AgroMap is packed with features and best development practices that can’t be seen. It all adds up to a system performance which delivers optimized processes to the company.
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AMAZON S3
Holds all static resources including angular app itself. Amazon S3 servers are optimised for serving static files, therefore it’s perfect for Angular App.
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ANGULAR
Angular was a platform of choice for this project. It was chosen due to its high degree of reliability and scalability.
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NODE JS
With modular approach, we used Node to make NOMI technology future proof. It will not restrict us for a single server and will be easy to make future updates or upgrades.
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ARCGIS
ArcGIS is the world’s most powerful mapping and analytics software. It was chosen for this project to map fields, track in real-time GPS positions of machinery and draw statistics using this data.
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MSSQL
Trustworthy enterprise level database which is perfect for dealing with high loads of data. Therefore it will sustain the app’s growth at various rates.
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SOCKET IO
Socket IO was chosen as a tool for real-time interactions between system and machinery.
