CRM and ordering platform for the agriculture industry

A powerful agriculture solution, Salesforce CRM with a complex knowledgebase and online ordering platform to support real-time agtech consulting, product selection, and quote generation for farmers to maintain crops in perfect condition, deal with pests and increase yield.

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  • Ресурс 2_1

    Services:

    Salesforce Consulting, Salesforce Development, Quality Assurance
  • Ресурс 6

    Industries:

    Agriculture
  • Ресурс 4

    Technology Stack:

    Backend: Apex, SOQL, SOSL
    Frontend: Standard Salesforce UI
    Declarative Development – process automation: Lightning Flow, Process Builder, Approval Process, Validation Rules, Workflows
    Integrations: Standard Salesforce API, Custom-built API endpoints, REST integrations with an ERM and suppliers systems
  • Ресурс 2_1

    Project Summary:

    Our client, a Ukrainian company working in the farming industry since 2016, decided to expand their agtech software capabilities and create a dynamic CRM for agriculture market purposes. Being focused on providing fast and high-quality service to their customers, they wanted to use cutting-edge technology to provide an online platform for farmers, agronomists, traders, and distributors to facilitate finding and purchasing necessary products to maintain crops in perfect condition, deal with pests and increase yield. Together with our client we created an agtech software solution able to provide immediate recommendations, suggest best value options, and allow fast online ordering with flexible yet compelling discount and motivation policies.

Client Background

Our customer is one of the most well-known agtech software companies in Ukraine, their history in the agriculture industry started in 2016. They focus on high-quality consulting and means for the improvement of various types of agriculture businesses by consolidating the power and knowledge of their partner farmers, distributors, traders, and machinery manufacturers. For instance, they help farmers identify, purchase, and use needed fertilizers and chemicals to ensure sustained crop yield.

Location: Ukraine

Industry: Agriculture

Timeframe: April 2021 – till now

Request

The goal of our client was to pioneer the agricultural software consulting market and build a robust and flexible software for agriculture that would allow them to bring farming goods search, comparison and purchase experience to the next level. They sought the state-of-the-art CRM for agriculture, equally beneficial and efficient for farmers, agronomists, traders, and distributors. The system was requested to provide immediate recommendations, suggest best value options, and allow fast online ordering with flexible yet compelling discount and motivation policies.
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days

To complete the initial research and to get the ballpark implementation cost & timeline. Further discovery sessions adjusted our technical design and estimations to be more precise

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hours

Our Salesforce solution saves at least 16 hours on every order to create a quote that includes discounts, promotions, flexible payment terms, product substitutes, etc.

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discount types

The order creation process supports 11 different discount types, inclusive and exclusive product bundles, and various promotions.

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engineers

Our flexible project team aligned with the customers’ pace and timeframes and completed from 0.5 to 32 hours of work per day.

Our Proposal

After a series of thorough exploratory sessions, we got a good understanding of agtech software companies’ business processes in general and of our client’s current pain points, and how to turn them into a key advantage for their business growth as well as for their partners and customers’ benefit. 


Building an agtech solution for guidance in choosing and buying the best suitable fertilizers and chemicals required a great deal of specialized knowledge, which we gained through consultations with agricultural experts. In order to effectively implement new technologies in agriculture, we needed to speak the same language with farmers and agronomists, immerse ourselves in the nuances of the industry, and understand its terminology, needs and specifics.


The Salesforce solution we proposed was aimed at achieving the following goals:

  • Simplifying the process of finding needed products for farmers

    With an easy-to-maintain database that contains information about all products with their ingredients and substitutes; products' usage instructions and consumption levels; crops and their needs during their lifecycle; diseases and chemicals that fight them.

  • Providing real-time quote generation

    With a sophisticated order process implemented directly in Salesforce that matches farmers' needs with best price offers from various manufacturers and distributors; takes into account more than 20 factors that are reflected in discounts for an end customer and bonuses for a salesperson; provides full transparency about payment terms and significant order terms.

  • Reducing qualification requirements for employees

    By embedding most of the knowledge of experienced agronomists and consultants into the Salesforce solution, this knowledge is applied automatically by the means of automated actions, complex calculations, helpful suggestions, and safe data validations.

  • Reducing maintenance expenses

    By implementing all business logic automation and calculations in a highly-configurable way that allows regular Salesforce users to create new discount policies and promotions; to adjust all relations between products, crops, diseases, etc.; to update the general knowledgebase and all information about products, etc.;

  • Supporting continued growth

    By building the foundation for digitalization of other areas of the business, including the creation of online portals for farmers and distributors; development of a flexible API for a mobile application for farmers; and integrating with ERP and supplier systems;

Challenges

  • Automating quote generation required us to go through all possible discount types and policies applied by manufacturers, distributors, and traders so that we wouldn’t miss any possible scenario or edge case when developing our solution. While the quote generation process was very complex to develop – it had to be intuitive, easy to maintain and extend in the future, so everything we’ve developed is extremely customizable and done according to Salesforce best practices and best user experience approaches.
  • Dynamic team-building helped to deal with a queue of requests to improve and modify the system. In most cases, it’s hard to foresee resource requirements to accomplish the project objectives in a timely fashion. We carefully matched the number of engineers on the project to suit development demands.

Results

 

The developed solution is an agtech software frontrunner, significantly reduces the amount of work and time needed to consult each customer while providing best-value propositions and full transparency for farmers, partners, and our customers’ business. New capabilities in real-time consulting gave our customer a great market advantage and improved their already high service quality even more. Gained transparency allows for better reporting and forecasting as well as for adding new technology-driven features with an easy-to-expand platform.

We keep working with the customer on extending the solution and bringing new capabilities to their employees and customers.