Situation
Agrirootz was founded in 2011 by Bauke and Marije Schreuder and they made it their business to offer the perfect solution to agricultural holdings in the field of storage, packing, and processing of agricultural products.
The company approached Valcon because they wanted to develop their own solution to control vegetable storing warehouses in a sustainable manner. They had an issue with their existing software, which was inflexible, slow, and outdated.
What they needed was an up-to-date and modern solution meeting today’s software standards, and built with the newest and most stable technologies. They needed to be able to serve their customers with a flexible, extendable solution for the next 10 to 15 years to come.
Approach
Valcon built a solution that can control devices, such as fans, coolers and heaters in a storage facility. The software connects to temperature and humidity sensors, which then detect and automatically regulate the conditions in the storage warehouse. Farmers can use a touch screen interface, and change the settings themselves or have the system run automatically.
The solution was created in three phases: Discovery, Prototype, and MVP phase. In the discovery phase, the architects and product leads researched the devices they needed to integrate. They conducted interviews with the founder and team, and pictured all the possibilities. After that, the prototype was built together with the development team. In September this year, the first system was successfully installed at a customer’s warehouse.
The solution is built using the .NET Core Framework, which includes a front-end created using the Angular frontend framework. To build the solution we had a project lead with a scrum team of backend, frontend, QA, and DevOps engineers. In this way we’ve been able to create a very special solution, integrated with a market-leader for industrial hardware, Beckhoff.
Results
We got to know the client – and even their family – extremely well, after working together in a true partnership. A modern, flexible and fast solution was built that can be used for the next 15 years. A result of the software is that 30% less energy is required to store the product for a duration of 9 months. The idea is that it will become a solution fully hosted in the cloud. In this way, a farmer could hypothetically sit on a beach while monitoring their storage facility and making sure that their valuable produce is taken care of.
