SAP Intelligent Agriculture: an introduction

Intro

Today, agribusiness companies are faced with an increasing amount of data captured on the field and farm. On the other hand, however, often lack standard solutions to efficiently use the data to optimize farming processes or provide better farming services.

This results in difficulty to establish digital decision support processes that leverage both farming data and existing farming experience while avoiding expensive and difficult to maintain custom built solutions. Now, SAP customers can optimize their plan-to-harvest processes and farming services while taking advantage of data science and machine learning capabilities.

SAP Intelligent Agriculture as part of the Industry Cloud and, built on SAP Business Technology Platform, enables Agribusinesses to implement data-driven farming processes and service offerings for farmers based on a standard platform. The solution also enables agribusiness customers to capture and process farming data required for origination and procurement scenarios. The solution helps to bridge the gap between farm and field data, core-enterprise processes, farmer collaboration channels and agronomic decision support models.

The solution offers enterprise-grade capabilities for farm data management to keep farming specific master data consistent across the enterprise and manage data about farming processes, and the environment they are operating in on a granular level. This approach also enables integration with core processes in SAP S/4HANA.

This applies to farming operations that are directly managed by Agribusinesses and enables Agribusinesses who are originating from farmers to efficiently record field data for sustainability and compliance purposes.

To enable agronomic decision support and recommendations (we call this farming intelligence) the solution enables agribusinesses to either leverage their own decision support models or integrate  3^rd party models from partners.

The solution also can serve as a solid backbone for multi-channel farmer collaboration and individualized – or even outcome-based – farming services that rely on detailed data about crops, environment, and farming practices.

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.

Based on SAP’s long-standing experience, SAP Intelligent Agriculture provides an enterprise-wide foundation for agribusinesses to run and offer data driven farming services leveraging data science and machine learning. Along with the industry cloud portfolio, SAP combines the power of SAP S/4HANA® and SAP Business Technology Platform with intelligent suite solutions to provide end-to-end vertical capabilities that deliver real business value.

Functionality Description

Farm data management

• • Allowing agribusinesses in different segments to manage farming and field data consistently across the enterprise
  • Broad crop independent standard data model
  • Enables integration with the SAP Intelligent Enterprise

Selected entities of farming data model

Farming processes

• • Manage farming processes and operations for own farms or 3^rd party farms
  • Capture and use task data alongside the farm planning, scheduling and execution process
  • Establish robust procedures for managing farming tasks to increase transparency on farming operations

Farming Intelligence

• • Leverage structured and unstructured data from the solution and a variety of sources for data science and machine learning scenarios
  • Develop new or integrate existing decision support models
  • Increase efficiency and sustainability in farming processes by providing intelligent executable recommendations towards farmers and farm managers

Farming Ecosystem Readiness

• • Leverage the headless UX architecture which offers API’s that can be used by partners and customers to build differentiating farmer collaboration frontends and channels
  • Enable integration of different partner solutions along the E2E farming process
  • Enable ecosystem partners the ability to develop partner solutions addressing specific verticals or processes while leveraging stable standard processes

What are the benefits?

The detailed benefits are multifold depending on the usage scenario:

• • Consistency in your farming data
  • Break farming data-silos
  • Increased agility and speed of innovation in farming processes, services and collaboration
  • Accelerate transition to data driven farming
  • Transparency on farming operations
  • Precise farming activity management
  • Decrease complexity of developing, testing, and adopting innovations

SAP Intelligent Agriculture can help agribusinesses that run own farm operations to increase their profitability per farmed area and support their efforts towards achieving sustainable farming practices. Also, the solution can be used to enable data-driven farming services and products that are marketed to farming business partners which generates new business and increases adoption and retention of new farmer collaboration channels.

Both are key priorities for Agribusinesses around the globe. Profitability in many farming operations is a key challenge and optimizing yields, quality of crop produces as well as optimizing use of crop inputs such as fertilizer, crop protection can have large effects. Many factors come into play on how to achieve this and farming operations differ significantly across the globe: different farm sizes, farming practices, different crops, level of mechanization and standardization etc. Still across all these differences we hear consensus that yields, and cost need to be improved by leveraging new types of relevant data.

The solution also can help customers with managing farming data as part of origination and procurement processes in a standardized way. You can find more information how the solution helps agribusinesses to approach sustainable farming within the SAP Sustainability Navigator.

SAP Sustainability Navigator

What’s Next for SAP Intelligent Agriculture?

This is just the start.  As part of this digital journey, the vision is to support a growing set of features that support agribusinesses to run efficient and sustainable farming processes and services.

Visit SAP’s Roadmap Explorer to keep up to date on the latest and planned innovations.

Also check out how fresh produce companies can benefit from SAP Intelligent Agriculture and other Industry Cloud Solutions from farm-to-fork.

Summary

With this blog you should have gotten a first overview on SAP Intelligent Agriculture.

If you are interested to learn more please check out the SAP Intelligent Agriculture product page for more details and understand more about our industry solution portfolio for Agribusiness.

Watch out for more insightful blog posts and content on this solution.