Sentera: Improving Outcomes for Growers

Sentera: Improving Outcomes for Growers

Case Study

 

Improving Outcomes for Growers

Sentera

AI powered agriculture insights leader Sentera, partnered with SDG to re-imagine their flagship software platform product.

Challenges

Engineer driven design
Complexity of solution
Data visualization

SDG Solutions

Product mindset
Product leadership
Experience design
Prototype development

Driving agricultural value

Sentera uses multiple data sources, like satellites, drones, on-field machines, and human observers, to populate a comprehensive data lake. With their data, they generate in-season analytics and intelligence to increase precision and efficiency, improve visibility to supply chains, or measure and promote land stewardship and sustainability.  Their technology delivers time-sensitive insights that optimize decisions and improve outcomes to drive agricultural value.

Sentera’s products were created by engineers with deep experience in sophisticated aerospace technology, but Sentera’s executive leadership understood that it was the outcome – the insights gathered through this technology – that provided the real value to their customers.  They recognized the strategic importance of having a strong software product designed in a way that was easy to use and understand, enabling their users to make sound agricultural decisions.   Accomplishing this would require the organization to adopt a different mindset, shifting the focus from delivering engineering capabilities to a more holistic approach that packages insights in a way that more directly maps to customer value.

Shifting the Mindset

Sentera chose SDG as their partner to articulate and accelerate this ambitious strategy and lead the efforts to embed this digital product mindset across the organization.

Creating the vision

To envision a new product, SDG product strategists used a multitude of techniques to start establishing priorities and clarifying a product strategy.  They participated in the Sentera product council, led engineering and business teams through collaborative planning workshops and collaborated with the Sentera team to build a strategic, thematic roadmap for its flagship software product.  Through these activities, the team created a compelling product vision and a plan to achieve it.

User research

Sentera’s users – agronomists, growers and enterprise customers – have unique needs, often dealing with intense pressure, harsh conditions and complex business relationships. SDG conducted user interviews and completed a heuristic analysis of existing applications to understand their true needs. As part of this analysis, engineers visited farms and co-ops where they learned first hand how Sentera’s products are used. The findings were used to prototype an innovative new digital experience aligning Sentera, and their users, with the vision.

Forming product teams

Establishing a product based organizational structure was key to Sentera becoming a product focused company.  SDG helped Sentera’s executives organize their staff into “product teams”, hire a new head of product, and increase their investment in experience design.  SDG consultants also engaged in discussions on product management, design, and development topics, and helped Sentera’s entire team re-think how they establish priorities, understand their customers and ship solutions.

 

Becoming a digital product company

 

Sentera has re-imagined their product as a comprehensive agronomic insights, decision-making, and communication platform that works for all users. In Sentera’s new product strategy, the drones are a feature of the agronomic insight’s product, not the reverse. Guided by this product strategy, Sentera is well on their way to becoming a digital product company, driven by deep understanding of their users and led by the value they can offer their market, not just the sophistication of their engineering.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

Cargill: Commodities trading, in the cloud

Cargill: Commodities trading, in the cloud

Case Study

 

Commodities Trading, in the Cloud

Cargill

Agriculture giant Cargill partnered with SDG to reinvent its global agricultural commodities risk trading platform from the ground up — and from the Cloud down.

Challenges

Multi-national scope
Multiple legacy applications
High financial stakes
Heavily regulated industry

    SDG Solutions

    AWS Cloud-hybrid Architecture
    Agile coaching
    Technology Delivery
    App modernization
    Application development

      Managing risk in global agriculture

      Cargill Corporation is the world’s leading supplier of products and services to the global agriculture industry. Risk management across commodities, industries, and geographies is one of Cargill’s critical business units, and Cargill maintains a portfolio of applications and infrastructure to enable this complex business. Every day, agricultural producers, investors, and regulators in countries across the globe use Cargill’s tools and data to make high-stakes financial decisions.

      Facing a competitive market and aggressive goals, Cargill Risk Management needed to transform their trading platform to a cloud first, modern technology platform. SDG worked alongside Cargill to design and implement a solution that improved the overall quality of market and performance data, reduced administrative costs, and increased usability and reduced errors through a modern, mobile-friendly user interface.

        Building the solution together

        In implementing the solution, SDG partnered with Cargill to redesign Cargill Risk Management’s fundamental approach to technology initiatives.

        The first step in a cloud technology strategy

        The biggest technical challenge: migrating from Cargill’s legacy infrastructure to an AWS cloud-based platform that would unify Cargill’s applications and data, without sacrificing productivity and performance.

        Cargill had considerable in-house expertise on this opportunity, and they had even already built a rough proof-of-concept. But to turn that expertise and conceptual work into the company’s first production-ready cloud app, Cargill engaged SDG. Together, SDG’s consultants and Cargill’s technology team designed a comprehensive cloud adoption strategy, with risk management applications positioned as one of the first solutions in an enterprise-wide app modernization strategy.

        A platform for growth

        The AWS cloud-hybrid platform that the SDG and Cargill team designed is robust enough to handle high volume, globally distributed transactions, while remaining flexible and adaptable to allow the team to rapidly build and deploy new capabilities as their users’ needs evolve.

        It’s a platform that Cargill is now putting at the heart of its strategic capabilities, where it will help Cargill differentiate from competitors and respond quickly to a changing market.

        Comprehensive roles

        SDG oversaw system development and configuration, coordinated deployments, and implemented mature product management and software development practices.

        SDG consultants partnered with Cargill in the following roles:

        • Agile project delivery and management
        • Product and Program management
        • Design, UX and Prototyping
        • Enterprise architecture and application development
        • Consultation on long-term product management and operational strategies
        • Digital operations best practices

        Transforming to agile methods 

        While building and delivering a sophisticated new technical solution, SDG also worked with Cargill to implement agile, product-driven methods across the enterprise. Agile coaches worked with technology teams and market and business experts to identify gaps in understanding and opportunities to be more productive for the business and satisfying for the teams.  

        While the transformation is just beginning, Cargill is already working in new ways, with more frequent releases, new integrated team models, and clear, shared understanding of the problem at hand.

        To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

        Images courtesy of Unsplash and Cargill