The Background

Agworld, a provider of cloud-based farming information management software, has been providing farmers and agronomists with portable tools connecting to centralised data since 2009. The software allows them to:

• input data while in the field into their iPad and iPhone;
• use the data to analyse performance and create detailed farm plans;
• collaborate through authorizing connections to share centralised information.

As the farming industry turns more and more towards precision agriculture (a farming method that aims to maximize crop yield through efficient resource utilization), Agworld’s development plan now includes creating features that will support farmers in implementing this new methodology.

The Requirement

Agworld’s plan to develop features that support precision agriculture into their repertoire requires the expertise of their most experienced staff. However, the bulk of their time is already consumed by other product improvements and maintenance.

To free up their time, Agworld had to find a way to take care of the day-to-day product improvement, maintenance and support with minimal intervention from Agworld’s experts.

The Solution

Agworld’s CTO, Stephen Baldry, had been looking into various options to resolve this issue and that was when he found Mitrais. Stephen did his research on Mitrais to see whether the offshore software development service provider is the kind of workforce Agworld would like to employ.

Stephen gave the Mitrais team the challenge to build a postcode app in 2 days using Ruby on Rails technology, one of the most popular technology stacks nowadays, and Agworld’s language of choice. The team met the challenge with flying colours, encouraging Stephen and one of his team leads to pay a visit to Mitrais’ Bali development centre to induct Mitrais’ team on Agworld’s development process. The Mitrais team has been engaged in Agworld’s projects since then.

“It was clear from the first visit to Mitrais’ office in Bali that they are a professional organization in every regard. They have well established processes and take security of their client’s data and intellectual property seriously,” Stephen commented.

The Mitrais’ team has been engaged in many improvements and maintenance tasks for Agworld, which benefit both Agworld’s customers and staff. For instance, the new Enhanced Group Renewals feature helps Agworld’s staff manage bulk subscription renewal. Where before the process required each renewal of corporate accounts to be done individually for each user’s subscription, now Agworld’s staff can process several subscriptions in one purchase.

Enhancements for Agworld’s customers include Activity E-mail Redesign, where new sales activity options are added to the email layout that the Agworld app can generate. The Importing Wizard feature enhancement simplifies the import process by providing instructions produced by a Wizard; users just have to follow the step-by-step pop-ups. The Mitrais team is also responsible for bug fixing, whether from legacy or newly developed systems.

Mitrais is now an important part of the Agworld team, helping them to manage the existing software and perform the required enhancements. Recently the Mitrais team has participated in the Agworld hackathon, winning third place with their proposed enhanced User API, which is currently being developed further for deployment to Agworld software users around the globe.

With Mitrais taking care of some of Agworld’s current products maintenance and enhancements, Stephen said Agworld’s team will continue to improve and expand the precision agriculture features to bring more value to their customers in 2016 without compromising their current service standard.