Overview
Nutrien Ag Solutions are the largest distributor of both farming supplies and fertiliser in Australia, with a team of more than 4,000 farming experts. They provide a range of services and products in different farming areas, including precision farming services, marketing livestock and wool, agricultural services, water, finance, insurance, merchandise and real estate.
After decades of serving Australian farmers as separate companies, Ruralco and Landmark combined in 2019 to become Nutrien Ag Solutions, marking a new era in Australian ag retail.
The Challenge
Nutrien Ag Solution’s Senior Manager of IT Planning & Architecture, Sriram Kalyan and his team, had been receiving a significant number of data requests from across the business and wanted to get some support in creating a qualified pipeline of projects.
After receiving a recommendation from a peer in the industry, and assessing their options, Sriram and his team brought Ignite in to help.
Our Solution
Our senior leadership was brought in to assist Nutrien Ag Solution’s Procurement function first, working through a series of workshops to help Nutrien and its IT Planning & Architecture team to identify and understand current pain points and areas for growth, through information gathering across all areas of a business.
Identifying a solution requires understanding the underlying needs and issues faced by users, and what they currently rely on to make informed decisions.
All areas of Nutrien’s diverse Procurement function were included – spanning Crop Chemicals, Water, Fertilisers, Proprietary Products and Seed.
Due to COVID, the workshops were run online over two days.
Identify the potential value in data and create a pathway to realising it.
Using Ignite’s methodology in a time defined scope, our Analytics Pathway delivers:
- Prioritised business analytics pipeline
- Insight into the unique needs of internal and external personas
- Grouped data and analytics requirements
- Defined data and solution architecture
- Optimised Prototype-to-Production operating model
- Executable workplan
- Comprehensive business case
“We were worried at first about them not being face to face but Ignite made it really work. Harj had some good engaging processes like moving people around virtual breakout rooms so the idea generation phase wasn’t dominated by individuals. This culminated in some fantastic ideas and really useful cases.”
“Ignite brought the expertise, a pragmatic approach and a focus on getting to the business value. This always comes before jumping straight into the technical solution, with Ignite. And they have experience working in our industry – and that showed.”
Results
The workshops resulted in five use cases that were identified as able to add value to the organisation. Ignite helped to determine the value, validating these as commercial benefits, or other tangible benefits like saving time or minimising risks.
From this pipeline, Sriram’s team have progressed three projects and are working internally to refine and prove their value. Then the team will deploy the solutions internally.
Where to next?
Nutrien Ag Solutions will look at working through a similar process with other areas of the business to identify more opportunities in using data to drive business value. And they will look to Ignite to help them.
