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Product Information
Author's profile photo Harald Schlueter

The SAP Agricultural Origination Portal – Digitally Connecting Farmers

Intro

Digital and farming?  Perhaps something, at least not historically, you’re accustom to hearing together.  You may be envisioning a farmer growing crops, delivering them for sale and receiving a written invoice to be paid at some point in the future.  You’re not too far off!  Today’s origination process for farmers and agri companies to contract, deliver and settle often involves many manual and even paper-based methods.  Visibility into this information is also often the same causing companies to resort to old, inefficient ways of working such as phone calls and emails into back-office clerks, resulting in increased workload.  The agricultural companies that do offer a digital platform for their business partners can encounter IT infrastructure challenges with custom-built apps requiring considerable investment in development resources.  In today’s era of digital transformation though, agricultural companies are increasingly focusing on boosting the end-to-end customer experience of their business partners.

The SAP Agricultural Origination Portal, part of the Industry Cloud, built on SAP Business Technology Platform, enables efficient collaboration between farmers and agricultural origination and trading organizations.  This is achieved by providing farmers real-time access to their contractual obligations, deliveries, settlements, and unsold inventory.  Through an intuitive cloud-based offering, farmers can make insightful decisions and agricultural companies can reduce back-office workload and increase business partner satisfaction while lowering IT costs.

The Industry Cloud is SAP’s strategy to extend the intelligent suite with innovative cloud solutions.  Built by SAP and partners, it offers an agile, open business and technology platform for our customers.  Watch Julia White, SAP’s Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer, provide a great intro on the Industry Cloud.  Explore even further at https://www.sap.com/industries/industry-cloud.html and Industry Cloud Community.

Functionality Description

Let’s review more of the product’s key features.

The Agricultural Origination Portal has a cloud-based data model with secure and timely data replication .  Due to the openness of the solution, data can also be acquired from other legacy applications.  The user interface grants business partners graphical overview, list and detailed views for:

  • Contractual terms and conditions including pricing & quantity statuses, dates, fees and optionalities.
  • Delivery status including planned and unplanned activities and any quality based volume adjustments.
  • Settlement information such as when they’ve been generated, the amounts, any price adjustments and payment status.
  • Visibility into co-mingled inventory across all commodities

 

Farmer accounts can easily be onboarded and managed for those with administrative permissions.  The product also offers an intuitive, flexible user interface supporting configurable views and filters.  Additionally, an analytics dashboard contains rich KPI’s across all origination activity and is supported for both desktop and mobile devices.

Origination Dashboard

Settlement%20Overview

Settlement Overview

For customers who have a platform in place, they can leverage the Headless UX architecture delivered as part of the initial release.  API’s delivered with the product can be used by partners and customers to:

  • Support UI flexibility with fully custom frontends and portals of their technology of choice (all while leverage a stable Industry Cloud backbone)
  • Integrate custom portals, platforms or 3rd party apps for competitive differentiation and business continuity with farmers
  • Incorporate into other SAP or 3rd party products (e.g. Customer Experience for merchants)

 

Check out more information on SAP Help.

 

What are the benefits?

The Agricultural Origination Portal offers efficient collaboration between agricultural companies and their farmers. Other benefits include:

  • Reduced number of calls and inquiries from farmers and, thereby, reduce the workload for back-office clerks
  • Increased farmer satisfaction to improve farmer loyalty, retention rate, and contract renewals
  • Decreased IT spend to build and maintain a custom solution

 

What’s Next for the Agricultural Origination Portal?

This is just the start for the product.  As part of this digital journey, the vision is to support more collaborative and interactive features between Agri companies and their business partners.  Visit SAP’s Roadmap Explorer to keep up to date on the latest and planned innovations.

 

Now, you have learned about one aspect of Farming going digital and how SAP addresses and streamlines this process with the SAP Agricultural Origination Portal App.

Please feel free to ask questions on Industry Cloud in general or this App in particular.

 

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      3 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Harald Schlueter
      Harald Schlueter
      Blog Post Author

      I am happy to also share the video with you. Enjoy watching!

      Author's profile photo Simon Neumann
      Simon Neumann

      The latest release, available since June 2022, contains the following new features: 

      1. Bids to Contracts 

      • Enables Agri companies to post bids to the portal where one or more partners may accept, requesting them to convert into a trading contract. Bids can be priced in a variety of methods (future, basis, flat and unpriced) and business rules can be used to manage quantity tolerance ranges.  Ranges grant Agri companies control over how much percentage producers can request above and below a bid quantity.
        Key information is displayed in the portal including: 
        • Commodity 
        • Pricing 
        • Quantity 
        • Delivery period 
        • Incoterms 
        • Location 
        • Validity period of bid 

      • AGOP%20available%20bids

       

      • AGOP%20bids%20overview
      • When producers request a contract from a bid, it triggers the creation of a draft trading contract in the connected backend system. A trader can then approve or decline the requested contract. Approved contracts are subsequently displayed in the portal.
      • Create%20new%20contract

      The whole process is reflected by the bid status, so the producer can follow the flow. 

      With the bid to contract conversion functionality we provide the following benefits to the origination company and their producers: 

      • Increase speed and efficiency for Agri companies to fill demand via the portal bidding process 
      • Reduce effort for both producers and Agri companies to transact  
      • Error reduction due to structured bidding and contract conversion process 

      Link to help portal.

       

      2. Pricing Futures

      • Producers are now able to request the futures pricing digitally within the portal for existing contracts where the future component is yet unpriced (Fully unpriced contracts, or contracts with only basis/differential/premium priced)
        PF%20NFE
      • The latest future price will be retrieved from a configurable connected price source (back-end or external market data) and used to fully or partially fix the futures component of the contract.  Price fixations result in a contract amendment which must be approved in the back-end system by the merchant or can be configured to be auto-approved.
        Pricing%20future

      With the above functionality we provide the following benefits to the origination company and their producers: 

      • Reduce the workload of your back-office clerks by digitizing futures pricing 
      • Increase efficiency for producers to lock in futures prices in volatile markets 
      • Allow producer to react quicker on market price movements and take advantage of those 

      Link to help portal.

       

      With the two new Features you can accelerate your digitization journey with SAP and simplify the origination processes for you and your producers. 

      Author's profile photo Simon Neumann
      Simon Neumann

      “I like today’s commodity market Futures price and like to fix my unpriced contracts Which of my contracts are future unpriced? ”

      “I have planned my harvest schedule. Is that aligned with required next deliveries that are scheduled and coming up

      “I want to close a new contract. Are terms and conditions for qualities in line with my expectation on what I can deliver and do I even have the possibility to get a premium for better quality?”

       

      These are questions farmers can ask themselves and want to have an answer as soon as possible without being tied on central desks opening hours. Depending on the answers they must schedule their harvest to meet the contractual aligned quality and time expectations.
      With the latest release of SAP Agricultural Origination Portal, the questions and many more can be answered directly on the field by using any mobile device.
      The release includes the following feature and is available December 2022:

       

      1. Advanced contract pricing visibility of price fixation types

       

      This feature allows you directly to filter your contracts in the dashboard by price fixation type. The supported price types are:

      • Priced, flat priced quantity of a contract
      • Unpriced, quantity for which no price is established
      • Futures unpriced, no futures price established plus no priced established
      • Basis unpriced, no basis price established plus no price established

      By using the filter, you can identify contracts easier, quicker and mak pricing of these a much simpler and easier task to fulfill.  In addition, you increase visibility into the pricing status of producers’ contracts and allow the user to directly navigate to the price fixing list.

      Thus, the question “Do I have contracts where I can price the Futures component today?” can be easily answered by filter the contracts for “Future Unpriced” and “Unpriced” price types.

      Select%20price%20fixation%20type%20from%20the%20Dashboard

      Select price fixation type from the Dashboard

       

      1. Contract execution plan – view undelivered purchase and sales orders

       

      Predictable deliveries are important for both parties, the producers, and the company. With the contract execution plan monitor they have full transparency and visibility of the planned contract execution and their associated planned deliveries. When you Call-Off an SAP ACM contract quantity with a Purchase or Sales Order, you can provide this information directly to your business partner.

      The information can be consumed via:

      • Dashboard with a view of the undelivered order quantity by commodity through the cards
      • List and detailed information per Order

      You can improve decision-making for your business partners such as farmer and suppliers by providing a view into planning activities relating to contract fulfillment. With this they know when to make the next delivery to be in time.

      Access%20your%20purchase%20or%20sales%20Call-Offs%20directly%20from%20the%20Dashoard

      Access your purchase or sales Call-Offs directly from the Dashoard

       

      Check%20the%20Order%20details

      Check the Order details like Shipping Information or find the linked based Contract and Delivery document

       

      1. Updated agricultural contractual details for commodity quality schedules

       

      Qualities are key for every agricultural crop delivery when it comes to the final price calculation. You can now provide commodity quality terms and conditions captured on agricultural contracts to your business partner. The information includes:

      • Quality schedule
      • Minimum value
      • Maximum value
      • Adjustment rates

      Your business partner can check directly in the Agricultural Origination Portal which quality terms and conditions apply to their next delivery. They see the acceptable contractual quality ranges with any value adjustments to apply. In addition, they can check which quality terms and conditions need to be fulfilled with their next delivery to close an open contract.

      Check%20which%20quality%20terms%20and%20conditions%20apply%20to%20a%20contract

      Check which quality terms and conditions apply to a contract

       

      The quality information is also part of your offered Bids, where a producer can decide if the characteristics can be met. If so, they can directly request a contract from the App.

      See%20the%20quality%20requested%20at%20a%20bid%20to%20evaluate%20if%20you%20are%20able%20fulfill%20them

      See the quality requested at a bid to evaluate if you are able fulfill them