Analyzing the Strategic Positioning of SAP Intelligent Agriculture

Since the beginning of agricultural production, humans took farming decisions manually based on their expertise.

Nowadays, farming processes and farming decisions are undergoing a massive transformation.

Farming is becoming data-driven. There is a significant increase in the relevant data available from fields and farms (for example, weather data, soil analysis,and IoT data) that can be used to drive better decisions. This offers many possibilities to adjust farming processes (for example, crop varieties, technology, and application).

On the other hand, companies and farmers often lack solutions to efficiently use that data, and the available Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning models, to help optimize farming processes or provide better farming services. This results in difficulty establishing digital decision support structures that apply both farming data and existing farming experience.

SAP Intelligent Agriculture enables agribusinesses to sustainably increase farming efficiency by digitalizing their farming processes and services from plan-to-harvest, taking advantage of data science and machine learning capabilities.

The solution offers a robust farming data foundation and core capabilities around managing farming data, farming processes, and farming intelligence. Its open concept driven by APIs enables easy integration with various systems to help companies digitalize processes along the crop growing cycle end-to-end.

SAP Intelligent Agriculture supports a broad range of farming and farmer collaboration companies from different segments, including:

• Large industrial and enterprise farming with their own farming operations, which can span across grains and oilseeds (such as wheat and corn); coffee, cocoa, sugar, and other traded crops; and fresh produce (fruit and vegetables, nuts, and so on.)

• Companies collaborating with farmers such as Consumer products companies buying from farmers and Cooperatives buying from or servicing farmers.

• Providers of farming services (for example farm equipment) and inputs (seed, fertilizer, crop protection, and so on) and ecosystem partners (financial services, sensor providers, and so on.)

SAP Intelligent Agriculture can support multiple areas of farming and farming-related business processes.

The solution supports efficient and sustainable farming operations with capabilities that help to automate farming decisions and operations using data, enables the provision of individualized agronomic advice, farm services and product recommendations, and helps companies to establish digital farming services and solutions.

Supported business areas for efficient and sustainable farming:

• Own farming operations.
• Farming and agronomy services.
• Contract farming and outgrower collaboration.
• Farming Research and Development.

For topics around crop origination and supply chain, the solution offers the option of aligning origination and supply chain processes with farming operations based on field and farm data, helps to record and manage farming data required for compliance purposes and can help to adapt and optimize supply-chain planning processes by incorporating information from field and farm.

Supported business areas for origination and supply chain:

• Origination and procurement transparency and compliance.

• Harvesting and receiving logistics.

• Supply chain and logistics optimization.

For topics around consumer transparency and sustainability, SAP Intelligent Agriculture offers the option of recording farming data for sustainability reporting or certification requirements, helps to manage the environmental product footprint and brings transparency into the sustainability status of farming operations with the goal to optimize.

Supported business areas for consumer transparency and sustainability:

• Sustainability management.

• Consumer product innovation.

• Farming process management and transparency.

The foundational heart of the product is a unified farming data and domain model, a single source of truth, where the farm master data and structured transactional farming data can be stored and made available for access to different stakeholder groups. On top of that a farming API service layer provides simple, cloud-native, and scalable APIs.

The solution offers core functionalities around farm data management, farming capabilities and farming intelligence, which will be detailed out in the next section.

Embedded Farming Intelligence allows companies to implement robust strategies around farming decision support models over their full lifecycle, and bring estimations and actionable recommendations into farming processes and services.

The open concept and API-first approach enables easy integration with various systems to help companies digitalize processes along the crop growing cycle end-to-end. This includes integration with the SAP solution portfolio and SAP’s rich ecosystem of partner solutions, to build or use apps directly integrated with SAP Intelligent Agriculture to address and expand specific verticals, or processes along farming processes.

Some examples of use cases and integration scenarios enabled through the solution:

• Simple and structured access to all farming data.

• Integration into data services from different fields and IoT data sources.

• Integration with your own, or partner-provided farming decision support and Artificial Intelligence models for crop-specific recommendations, yield forecasting, and so on.

• Integration with core processes within SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP S/4HANA, and Intelligent ERP solutions to accelerate data exchange and build-up data consistency.

• Efficient integration of different front ends and interaction channels towards farmers (portals, mobile apps, digital platforms, and so on) through a headless user experience approach.

SAP Intelligent Agriculture structures data from fields and farms, improving the consistency of farming data. It helps reduce the complexity and effort involved in integrating farming innovations into end-to-end processes. This in turn enhances farming decisions, enabling agribusinesses to provide informed recommendations to independent farmers and growers.

By focusing resources and budget on differentiating capabilities, and maintaining the stability of core processes and data models for farming and grower engagement, businesses can drive agility and flexibility in the areas of farming innovation. In addition, SAP Intelligent Agriculture enables agribusinesses to deliver a superior and consistent grower experience across all channels of interaction.