Agricultural Technology: the Right Mix for an Important Mission

The agricultural-technology industry delivers products for the world’s increasing demand for food and examines how a food supply for ten billion people will be achieved in the future. It is doing this job in a difficult market environment, where the available agricultural area that can be used as productive land is largely already utilized nationally and internationally. At the same time, the half-life for the machinery and plant used has risen just as much as their efficiency has in recent years. The consequences of this are increased pressure and more intense competition, where it becomes more and more difficult for companies to maintain or improve their market position. Globalization additionally presents its own challenges, whether they be environmental catastrophes, political upheaval, or the outbreak of disease. This all has consequences for your production and supplier reliability when your supply chains are globalized!

Which Three Business Areas Can Be Improved?

In our experience, there are three areas of business above all in which a company’s competitive position can be permanently improved through process-optimized measures:

• Production and supply chains: At some companies there is often still a great deal of room for maneuver when it comes to order management and managing the company’s supplier network. Consider processing times for instance: The period of time up to delivery can be significantly reduced through clean order and supplier management. With the consistent application of lean principles, we can reduce the proportion of non-value-adding activities to a minimum in many areas, from the receipt of an order through to its completion.
• Production: Flexible production processes make it easier to react quickly and effectively to market developments. Ideas for this area can include establishing market-oriented production, where manufacturers always produce their machinery and plant with seasonal requirements in mind.
• Digital transformation: Most agricultural technology companies have, in terms of digital transformation, so far focused on their products – with “autonomous land machinery” being the key words. However, many manufacturers and suppliers have tended to overlook the opportunities that digital transformation offers for their internal processes.

It is crucial that digital transformation never becomes an end in itself. What makes the difference is a point-by-point, target-focused approach. For example, one essential factor for success consists in increasing transparency throughout the supply chain and in quality management. When agricultural technologycompanies make data visible – data that is in many cases already available – they can respond more quickly to irregularities and fix complications before they become an actual issue. This strengthens certainty for planning and makes it easier to use company resources as efficiently as possible.

The Right Mix of Lean Management and Supply-Chain Management

At Ingenics, we rely on a mix of the new and the tried-and-true for our clients in the agricultural technologysector. We analyze your present situation together with you and, based on it, we identify the steps needed for lasting improvements. The combination of lean management, digital technologies with targeted use, and clean order, quality, and supply-chain management, for example, is a proven success.

No matter what it may be, our experts have successfully realized a vast number of agtech projects in previous years, at corporations active globally as well as at small- and medium-sized enterprises. We know the industry-specific factors that agricultural technology must deal with and the levers that we can use for it. That is why we are brilliantly equipped for the agricultural technologymission of supplying food to the world’s growing population.