Product Information
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 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.
I am happy to also share the video with you. Enjoy watching!
The latest release, available since June 2022, contains the following new features:
1. Bids to Contracts
Key information is displayed in the portal including:
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:
Link to help portal.
2. Pricing Futures
With the above functionality we provide the following benefits to the origination company and their producers:
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.
“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:
This feature allows you directly to filter your contracts in the dashboard by price fixation type. The supported price types are:
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 price fixation type from the Dashboard
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:
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 your purchase or sales Call-Offs directly from the Dashoard
Check the Order details like Shipping Information or find the linked based Contract and Delivery document
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:
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 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 the quality requested at a bid to evaluate if you are able fulfill them