Every year we’re all bombarded with new technologies, some of it hype, some of it reality, and everything in between.
To implement a useful strategy, we need to be anchored by a few things: the organisation’s culture, goals, needs and objectives, and a decision-making framework for technology. This is where organisational culture and alignment come into play.
At ZZ2 we have an approach to strategy that is fractal in nature. In other words, each more detailed replication has the same structure as the larger one and dovetails into it.
This makes it possible for each business unit and department to have enough freedom to define its structure and capabilities, and strategic goals to meet the needs of the rest of the organisation, without it being hindered by knowing all the intricacies of each specialised business unit.
Our business is always open to learning, new ideas, and new technologies. This moves us to seek out innovation and makes us adaptable to change. The organisational culture must provide the platform for technologies to thrive, and to be able to implement new technologies and pivot away from lagging ones.
At ZZ2, not all innovation is driven directly from the technology business unit; it can come from any part of the business where anyone can make a suggestion or ask for assistance implementing a new technology, which is clearly a strength.
Strategic technology
ZZ2 has a framework for choosing technologies. They must provide authentic value, pragmatic solutions, be implementable, scalable, useful, functional, and cost-effective.
Guiding principles for managing technology:
- Simplify and standardise apps and technologies
Strive for fewer permutations of technologies. If you have a type of system, it’s best to have that same system throughout your organisation, but if necessary a different model from the same supplier. This applies to software used for programming languages, databases, cloud providers, bakkies and tractors. It embeds the economies of scale into your system.
Strive for simplicity and standardisation over time. This is something ZZ2 also struggles with, as it’s not easy to replace all the infrastructure or systems overnight.
- Capture validated and useful data at source and use it many times
Traditionally, someone writes transactions down on paper, and then at some point tries to capture that information into a formal system. The problem is that paper doesn’t help guide you to make sure your data is validated and compatible with the system that it will eventually go to.
I’ve seen big companies with amazingly complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that cost hundreds of millions of rands, where all the heavy lifting is done in Excel and imported into the ERP system, instead of being captured using an app on a phone where the action happens.
Our mission is to create systems that ultimately form subledgers or subsystems for a particular function where the paper can be read into, where a mobile app can become the capturing tool in the field and then where an IoT device can potentially stream data into.
One practical example of this has been our fleet management system that assists with capturing logsheet entries.
Previously people would capture activities on paper that was incompatible with fleet types, necessitating a backwards and forwards phone call just to capture data.
The mobile app has made it possible to decentralise the capture of validated data where the user performs the activity. This also makes the information near real-time.
- Internet first
We live in an ever-connected world, and the Internet is the backbone of any modern organisation. It should therefore form part of the infrastructure foundation. We need to build robustness into our applications and processes to make allowance for a level of offline tolerance. - Automate where possible
Technology should provide an exoskeleton of ‘awesome’ around a human being. For the foreseeable future we will have people involved, in some way, shape, or form, in most of our processes.
It is a worthy endeavour to empower them with apps and technologies that allow them to capture more than just the data they see, or assist with validating the information they capture. This is where machine learning vision can play a huge role in standardising the information obtained or automating the capture.
This allows a person to go from remote data capturing to actually sense-checking what they’re capturing and trying to improve the business.
- Own the source code of the system
The more divergent your code bases, the less the economies of scale, and the more difficult it is to retain knowledge of the architecture of each type of system, or truly specialise in a technology type.
It’s ineffective to have multiple different code bases like Flutter, Xamarin, ReactNative and PHP.
- Beware of vendor lock-in
You must be able to choose when to leap to another system rather than be forced to when you’re not ready. Beware of big monolithic solutions that force you to buy add-ons, or where only their solutions are compatible with each other.
This can have serious implications for your business, so keep tabs on how the world of software as a service (SaaS) is constantly changing.
Be careful of being reliant on a SaaS solution that might change direction away from your intended direction, change its costing model, or be end-of-lifed.
Getting practical
Technology should not be pursued merely ‘for the sake of it’. Rather, it should be directed at enhancing organisational effectiveness, streamlining processes and operations, improving human productivity, mitigating environmental impact, or a combination of these objectives.
Consider the Japanese Lean Manufacturing principles (maximum customer value, minimum waste).
The seven ‘wastes’ formulated by Toyota engineer Shigeo Shingo are: the waste of superfluous inventory of raw material and finished goods, waste of overproduction, over-processing, waste of transportation, excess motion, waiting, and the waste of making defective products.
Now consider this in the context of farming. Environment and soil: maximise your utilisation of resources such as soil types and climatic conditions. Manage water: should water be moved now from underground sources to above ground, or is it being applied to a plant that doesn’t need it just yet? It costs money to move water from one point to another. It evaporates and leaks out of dams.
Plant management: inputs are all very important in terms of timing and quantity. Here we’ve partnered with innovative technology company Phytech to help monitor the plant health in near real-time to assist in decision-making.
Each of these activities incur costs in terms of labour, fuel, and material, and should be timed for the greatest impact.
Digital technology can impact the business in three ways. In terms of direct cost, choosing one technology over another, or implementing a specific technology in a more cost-effective manner; improving visibility and insight in order to make more effective and efficient decisions about expensive activities; increasing the productivity and efficacy of the money spent.
The holy grail is to improve the productivity or output of the business and thereby have a direct impact on revenue.
The business environment created at ZZ2 is one in which failure is not terminal, as long as you learn from your mistakes.
Innovation is not a clinical, faultless process but an amazing journey. At the end of the day it takes a whole team working together with a plan to accomplish these goals.
ZZ2 has designed its digital technology business unit in a way that builds from the underlying foundation of infrastructure all the way to the higher-order functions that depend on that infrastructure.
ZZ2 is geographically dispersed throughout South Africa and Namibia, with sites ranging from farm offices to formal offices, all the way to packhouses.
We also extend this with a lot of our own infrastructure.
The views expressed in our weekly opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Farmer’s Weekly.
For more information email Martin Jansen at [email protected].
