Agrista's Blog

Customer mapping made easy

2012-01-18T12:27:10+01:00

Many companies talk about their customer insight but rarely venture into doing something about gaining it. To draw up to date customer information from various nooks and crannies throughout your organisation is simply not as simple as it sounds.

Agrista has been working on this problem for what seems like the better part of a decade. And we feel we have created something irresistably easy that makes your customer base more accessible than you could imagine. We call it Wallmap.

Wallmap at its heart is geo-located customer relationship understanding coupled with your service areas and products. What it provides is facinating market analysis and levels of collaboration and cross-selling you have yet to see in your organistaion.

Making it easier to follow updates in your business network

2011-07-18T22:19:42+02:00

Keeping track of all changes on contracts and updates to business processes can be complex task. Previously you would have to navigate through various forms and reports to get insight into changes that are important to you.

We've worked hard on a new feature that we've launched today: Activity Streams. We now post any changes to customers contracts and other business documents to your home page. You can now simply log-in to see changes and then decide if these require an action from yourself.

You can also use the Activity Stream to conveniently post messages to colleagues or to your farming customers. Messages from colleagues and customers are also conveniently integrated into your Activity Stream

We're planning some exciting updates to Activity Streams that will make keeping on-top-of activities in your business network even easier.

T-Systems awards special prize to Agrista for innovative use of satellites

2010-10-22T09:37:24+02:00

Earth observations help protect against future food crises
New alternatives for financing agriculture in emerging countries
Pilot project in South Africa

At the seventh European Satellite Navigation Competition, Agrista received the GMES Masters prize form T-Systems for promoting agriculture in emerging countries. It also took second place in the overall Galileo Masters comptetition. Since 2004, this competition has singled out the best ideas for applying the forthcoming satellite navigation system, Galileo. For this year’s special GMES prize, T Systems was looking for ideas that use observations of the earth and satellite navigation for applications in farming, maritime surveillance or emergency situations. The Earth observation data comes from the European GMES program (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security).

Agrista’s award-winning collaboration platform brings together farmers and agricultural enterprises in emerging countries with international financiers over the Internet. The aim is to reduce their risk and, in doing so, to make more capital available to farmers. The solution can be used anywhere in the world from the cloud. It supports the exchange of information, cooperation between the various parties, the processing of financial investments, insuring against risks, and the management of projects. In order to increase willingness to invest, the system makes the opportunities and risks of specific projects transparent and calculable by linking current and reliable data from satellites with information from other sources.

Agrista and T-Systems are now preparing plans to host the collaboration patform on T-Systems' secure cloud platform to offer solutions for corporate customers across the world. They are also planning to jointly implement projects in future.

Using satellite data to protect against future food crises

Satellites from the EU’s GMES program deliver images, for example, which can be used to estimate the size, shape and location of agricultural production areas. They also provide ancillary data on the supply chain links with input suppliers and sales markets. They also assist in determining yields based on the observed health of plants, temperatures and humidity from space. This information is supplemented locally, to which end satellite systems like Galileo provide helpful positioning and navigation information.

Investments managed on Agrista's platform should help to boost food production, especially in emerging countries. In view of the world’s growing population, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations believes that global agricultural production needs to increase by 70 percent by 2050 if a food crisis is to be averted. This will require additional investments of almost EUR 30 billion a year in emerging countries.

Using satellite data to provide farmland valuations in South Africa

Agrista is currently implementing a pilot project with a leading bank in South Africa to provide a solution for the valuation of farms. The bank has to review the valuations of about 4000 commercial farmers each year to control the bank’s credit exposure. The Agrista platform will be used to register farmland and fixed improvements geographically using high-resolution satellite imagery. The farmland is classified into various categories such as cropland, irrigation and grazing to accurately value the land. Ancillary data such as soil properties and weather data are also provided on the platform to farm valuators to assist in their valuation. All parties involved in the valuation process submit and exchange business data online, including farmers, farm valuators, and officials of the bank.

ICT service provider in European satellite programs

T-Systems, as an ICT service provider and partner of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), is providing a large part of the ICT infrastructure for the Galileo satellite navigation system in the control center in Oberpfaffenhofen. This includes the local network (LAN) and the employee workstations, as well as operation of the telephone system and PCs. In addition, T-Systems has shown itself to be the leading ICT service provider in the Galileo program with comprehensive consultancy services, and is envisaged as the partner for networking all ground stations as well as designing and developing the maintenance and logistics system. The corporate customer arm of Deutsche Telekom uses an internationally recognized logistics management method in order to manage the systems across their entire lifecycle, thus meeting one of the requirements of the European Space Agency, ESA.

About Deutsche Telekom AG

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with over 131 million mobile customers, more than 37 million fixed-network lines and approximately 16 million broadband lines (as of June 30, 2010). The Group provides products and services for the fixed network, mobile communications, the Internet and IPTV for consumers, and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in over 50 countries and has more than 251,000 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenues of EUR 64.6 billion in the 2009 financial year – more than half of it outside Germany (as of December 31, 2009).

About T-Systems

Drawing on a global infrastructure of data centers and networks, T-Systems operates information and communication technology (ICT) systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions. T-Systems provides integrated solutions for the networked future of business and society. The company's some 45,300 employees combine industry expertise and ICT innovations to add significant value to customers’ core business all over the world. T-Systems generated revenue of around EUR 8.8 billion in the 2009 financial year.

Introduction to Agrista - The world needs to produce more food

2010-10-15T15:03:08+02:00

Agrista has launched an online technology platform that enables agribusinesses to offer bundled financial products to their customers. By incorporating crop insurance and the fixing of pricing with forward contracts, we are able to address requirements of third party financiers (mostly structured finance banks) for the financing of farmer‘s input requirements using the crop as collateral.

The platform also enables agribusinesses to exchange data with their farming customers and incorporates geospatial technologies to assist agribusinesses in managing risks.

Loan origination, credit management and facility management processes are standardised on the Agrista platform to ensure operational risk for financiers is controlled and that credit risk is mitigated or minimised.

Agrista aims to reduce the risk of financing agricultural projects, especially in emerging markets, and thereby make more funds available to farmers. We believe this is a vital component in increasing the agricultural production needed to match a growing global demand for agricultural commodities.

1.02 Billion people currently still suffer from hunger.
To feed a growing world population - expected to surpass 9 billion in 2050 - the FAO estimates that agricultural output will have to increase by 70 percent between now and then.
The FAO also has calculated 29.6 billion Euros must be invested annually into agriculture in emerging economies to meet the increased need for production.

We believe a new approach to financing agriculture in emerging economies is vital to address these problems.