How Ag Retail Will Be Judged By Farmers and Employees On Their Tech Use
In the next two to three years, Drew Garretson, Senior Director of Digital Experience at Ceres Solutions, believes we will be beyond just technology adoption, and the industry will have transitioned to a time of technology judgement. Customers and employees will start evaluating who they do business with and who they work for on their technology use.
“I don't know if it'll be 12 months, but I believe it's in 24 or 36 months, but I'm going to call it judgment,” he says. “I think our customers and our future employees are actually going to be judging us on our digital portfolio and our technology use to determine not if they want to come to work for us or if they want to do businesses with us.”
Ceres Solutions has a footprint of 70 locations in a 500 mile range across Indiana Michigan.
Garretson’s role is to help the co-op with its technology strategy, including its short-term implementation and long-term strategy. This ranges from business operations, digital customer experiences, and conservation/stewardship.
When it comes to the power of technology, Garretson is a believer.
“I believe that we're solving real problems and we can truly help make a difference at the farm gate with our customers,” he says.
To optimize the new technologies in agriculture, Ceres Solutions is using strategy to navigate their approach and increase their success.
“Strategy becomes a really important part of helping our people understand why we're doing the things we're doing,” he says. “I think we often jump right to what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.”
A successful implementation step his team has deployed is a better communication of the “why” behind using a new technology in the ag retail business.
“We help them understand the metrics behind why we believe what we're doing is important,” Garreston says.
“We went from the two or three locations to about 10 locations in 2021. We were very successful with that pilot project with them. And so we've again doubled. We now are at about 16 to 20 locations that are leveraging and utilizing that technology. It's more integrated into our workflow today. And we are now able to monitor close over 100 machines’ productivity, and we believe that will help us when we can measure things with technology like that do we can understand how we can you know, control them and make them easier and make them better for our employees and make it better for our customers as well,” he says.
Listen to the full interview on The Scoop podcast to hear about their new digital customer experience, the IoT Innovation Hub, and the co-op’s efforts to increase conservation practices.
