Create an innovative barley ecosystem to optimize and secure the stability of supply and production.

Background

Our client is the world’s leading brewer, with +200.000 employees in 150 countries and a portfolio of over +500 beer brands, with the ambition of bringing people together for a better world. Barley is one of the key beer ingredients. If there is not enough barley due to natural disasters, wrong treatment or of poor quality, it jeopardizes the entire beer production process.

Challenge

Our client would like to create an ecosystem where barley growers provide crop data and interact with researchers and data scientists to optimize crop production. The goal was to establish a local and resilient supply of high-quality raw materials through accelerating agricultural innovations that improve crop productivity and enhance grower livelihoods.

Approach

We started by organizing workshops using design thinking and requirements engineering methodologies to elaborate fit-to-purpose requirements for the whole ecosystem. Prototypes have been developed in an agile way to iteratively produce a central data ecosystem. Growers provide field and harvest data through usage of an online mobile web application, researchers use the input from the growers and fellow researchers around the world to breed more adapted and locally productive varieties and data scientists complement the data with external sources (climate, satellite, soil, etc.) and develop algorithms to provide tailored recommendations and services to growers.

Key results

Availability and quality of data

Rigid international collaboration and project management

Involvement of Subject Matter Experts and appropriate technological infrastructure

Benefits

Our client disposes of an integrated data ecosystem where data is generated and exchanged between growers and specialists, allowing them to improve and maximize crop production to secure the supply of barley to their production facilities.