Strong Progress on New Initiatives

Portfolio Update

Strong Progress on New Initiatives

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

This month, the Portfolio Management Center saw a lot of the recently kicked off Working Groups (WG) start to make progress toward their deliverables. WG16 – Crop Protection Product Guidelines had a two-day in-person meeting that was well attended. The dedicated time hosted by Land O’Lakes really helped the group agree on some baseline topics that will provide an excellent foundation to work from on subsequent virtual sessions. There is some big potential to streamline and align on how crop protection products are ordered, inventoried, and reported. The longer-term vision is the enabling of standardized barcodes. Their work will not only help reduce invoicing errors and improve supply chain logistics, it will also start to create the building blocks needed to enable easy traceability and sustainability reporting.

WG15 – Scale Tickets has been meeting for a few weeks now as well, and has a good plan laid out to capture uses cases leveraging some of the work done in the previous SPADE and CART projects. The team will be going through the different permutations on what happens when a load rolls across a scale at a grain elevator, processor, or feed mill to align on a standardized, digital scale ticket. The group is also collecting information on what is currently done in the industry today, ranging from how participating member companies manage scale tickets to what is in use by some European countries that have implemented national standards. If your company has an API specification that is publicly available for sharing scale ticket related information, please share it with me via email at ben.craker@aggateway.org so the team can include it in their review.

One of the topics that has had a lot of recent interest is WG17 – Field Boundary: Use Cases and Definitions. The call for participation went out to membership, but there is still time to join if you missed it. Right now, we are working on setting up smaller teams and individual meetings focused on each of the seventeen different uses cases identified in the charter. Once each group has documented the use cases, the larger working group will come together to review and identify the different terms and definitions identified across the use cases. Then these use cases and terms will be the foundation other work related to field boundaries going forward.

And the formation of new Working Groups is not slowing down either. We plan to kick off a new Working Group in the coming weeks focused on serialization as a spinoff of the work of the ADAPT Standardization effort. Once the standardized schema for the data model is complete, a need will still exist for a common method of serializing data to better facilitate the exchange between parties. If this effort is of interest to you, be on the look out for a call to participate in the weeks ahead.