Info Support Develops Future-Proof Digital Environment for Agrifirm

Royal Agrifirm Group is a cooperative in which more than 10,000 Dutch livestock farmers and growers have combined their purchasing power. The cooperative offers high-quality products such as animal feeds, seeds, fertilizers and crop protection products. The company also provides advice to growers and farmers on the products to be chosen. Agrifirm wants to contribute to a responsible food chain for future generations. Today, the cooperative must respond to a market that is changing rapidly, in part due to the shift to more vegetable products.

Agrifirm has chosen Info Support as its IT partner, among other things to develop and manage the webshop and the MijnAgrifirm environment – the digital platform for customers to order products quickly and easily. In addition, Agrifirm has a platform on which all applications, more than 20 of them, run.

“They want to set up the digital environment so that they can give optimal advice to their customers,” says Rick Oonk, Unit Manager Agriculture, Food & Retail at Info Support. “In addition, they want to offer their customers the best digital services. Agrifirm was looking for a partner who could realize this and help shape the digital strategy . The partner had to fit with Agrifirm in terms of culture and commitment and be able to provide specialists in the agrifood segment. As Info Support, we have proven experience with this segment .”

Part of the assignment was to implement professionalization in the way the teams worked together. Agrifirm wanted to work in a different way to improve reporting. In addition, Agrifirm wanted to increase productivity and predictability with the new digital environment. Now several Info Support teams are working on the digital transition. These are nearshoring teams, about half of which consist of developers from Romania. According to Oonk, this is an efficient solution because the nearshore employees are fully part of the teams. “Each team consists of a mix of Dutch and Romanian developers. The developers from Romania have also visited us in the Netherlands twice and we are in close contact with them. That does a lot of good for team bonding.”

One nice milestone is that the new Web shop is now live. “Within six months we rebuilt it. We also implemented our managed cloud platform MCPS that houses all their applications and allows Agrifirm to operate much more efficiently. We now need much less capacity to manage the platform.”

Every day, Info Support continues to build on Agrifirm’s digital strategy. That means there are still five teams at work. Rick Oonk: “They work with their own service management system. All questions and problems that come into it are registered and dealt with there. We have not only professionalized the development, but also the management. Thanks to well-run processes, we have created peace of mind in operations. With this, we work daily on our big goal: to shape Agrifirm’s digital strategy and further integrate it, both functionally and technically.”