Akanksha Barot · How I can help · Enterprises and agribusiness
Enterprises and agribusiness
The digital layer is rarely the hard part. The operation underneath it is.
Large agribusinesses usually have what a startup would kill for: a farmer base, a dealer network, agronomists on payroll, and produce moving already. The digital programme underperforms anyway. In my experience it is almost never because the software is bad. It is because the workflow it encodes was never designed, so the product automates a process nobody had agreed on.
Who this is for
Whether this page is about you.
- Agribusiness, food processors and input manufacturers with an existing farmer or dealer network.
- A digital or transformation programme that is live and behind.
- Leadership who cannot get a straight answer about what is actually happening in the field.
What usually goes wrong
Three problems I keep meeting.
- 01
The product automated a process that was never designed
Procurement is the usual example. Quality capture, price agreement, weighment and payment each have an informal version that works and a formal version that was written for audit. Digitising the second one and ignoring the first produces a system the field quietly routes around.
- 02
Field force cost is visible and field force output is not
Enterprises can tell you what the field team costs to the rupee and cannot tell you what it produced this week. Visit planning and sequencing is the cheapest fix available, and it is usually treated as an IT project rather than a product one.
- 03
Leadership reporting is assembled rather than generated
If the monthly view is built by hand from four exports, it is late, it is contested, and it is optimistic. The fix is upstream: capture the record where the work happens, once, as a by-product of doing the job.
What backs it
Every claim names where it came from.
Both AgriCentral and Jiva sat inside Olam. Enterprise procurement cycles, internal stakeholders, and a parent company’s reporting expectations were the operating conditions rather than an obstacle to complain about.
Olam Information Services (Mindsprint) and Olam Global Holdings, 2018 to 2025A field coordination and visit planning product improved field staff productivity by roughly 30 percent. Sequencing the day carried most of it.
Jiva AgServices, IndonesiaSix years carrying a revenue number before ever owning a roadmap, including three business lines at FarmBee across telecom, commodity trading and content monetisation, with revenue-share negotiation and telco-specific pricing.
RML AgTech (FarmBee), AVP Enterprise Relationships, 2016 to 2018Relevant here
The product streams this segment usually needs.
- Crop and produce procurement
Harvest purchase: quality capture, price agreement, weighment, and payment that lands when it was promised.
Source: Jiva, one of four core services on the direct-to-farmer platform. - Dealer, distributor and last-mile delivery
Wholesale and retail chains, delivery to the village, and payment collection from people who deal in cash.
Source: Three business lines at FarmBee across telecom, commodity trading and content monetisation. - Field agent management
Visit planning, sequencing, coordination and what each agent is accountable for by the end of the day.
Source: Jiva field coordination product, Indonesia. Roughly 30 percent field staff productivity gain. - Leadership reporting
The internal view leadership actually steers on, rather than the deck assembled the night before the board call.
Source: Internal operations tooling at AgriCentral and Jiva. - Traceability
A chain of custody from plot to buyer where every record was produced by someone doing their job anyway.
Source: Rebuilt as figure four on the home page from the production product. - Agri e-commerce
Input sales to farmers who compare against the dealer they have borrowed from for fifteen years. Price intelligence is the other half: AgriCentral carried more than a hundred crops across roughly two thousand Indian markets.
Source: Jiva agri-ecommerce. AgriCentral Market View. Marketplace GTM across Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Snapdeal and ShopClues at BoostMySale.
How it runs
What working together looks like.
- 01
Map the workflow as it is run
The real one, including the workarounds. Written down and agreed before a screen is designed.
- 02
Design the process and the product together
Roles, handovers, exception paths and reporting lines alongside the interface. They are one design problem.
- 03
Implementation and change management
Rollout with the field team, the dealer network and the agronomists, including what to do about the people who preferred the paper.
Questions
Asked before, answered straight.
We have a systems integrator already. Where would you sit?
In front of them. An integrator builds what the specification says. The recurring problem is that the specification encodes a workflow nobody validated in the field, so the build is competent and the adoption is poor. I would own the workflow design and the product decisions, and let the integrator do what they are good at.
Our field team resists every new system. How do you handle that?
By assuming they are right until proven otherwise. Field resistance is usually accurate information about a workflow that adds effort without returning anything. The fix is to make the system give the agent something first: a sequenced day, a shorter route, a faster payment, fewer calls from the office. Compliance follows utility.
Can you work with our existing procurement and ERP systems?
Yes, and the integration is rarely the interesting part. The interesting part is deciding which record is authoritative when the field and the ERP disagree, and what happens to a farmer’s payment while that is being resolved. That question is a product decision with commercial consequences and it usually has not been made.
What size of team have you run?
Eighteen at Jiva across Product, Design, Engineering, Data, Research and Field Ops, reporting to the Chief Product Officer. Twenty-six at AgriCentral, including agronomists as well as designers, engineers and analysts. Both were multidisciplinary by necessity: an agronomist and a designer disagreeing early is cheaper than a recall later.
Do you do this as an adviser or hands on?
Either, though the advisory version only works when someone on the inside owns delivery. If a programme is behind because nobody senior is holding the workflow, advice will not fix it and I would say so rather than take the engagement.
What this record is, and what it is not
Both platforms were built inside Olam, so enterprise procurement cycles, internal stakeholders and a parent company’s reporting expectations were the daily conditions rather than something read about. What is not here is a named external transformation programme delivered as a consultant. The enterprise experience is real and it was earned from the inside.
Published elsewhere
- PodcastLearnings from 10M downloads with AgriCentral PM Akanksha BarotThe Crop Chronicles, by Jiva. Episode 5, 31 minutes
How AgriCentral reached ten million downloads, why the first year of adoption was slow, and what transferred to Indonesia.
- InterviewLessons from 10 million downloadsJiva, on Medium
The written version. Acquisition, the seven languages, and the interface decisions that came out of watching farmers hold a phone.