The Proven Path to Creating Efficiency

From the President

The Proven Path to Creating Efficiency

By Brent Kemp, President and CEO

In last month’s newsletter, I reflected on AgGateway’s history of successes while observing that now is the time to implement resources or processes that improve your operational efficiency. Our collective experience in leading the charge on this front has demonstrated that it’s challenging work and there are no shortcuts.

So, how do we view the process of creating efficiency at AgGateway? There are three pillars:

First, it is deliberate. We all have legacy ways of thinking and doing tasks. We recognize that an order to cash process itself is fairly well defined from a muscle memory perspective, but is it well documented? Is it repeatable? Do we know where potential exception points are, and what we’ll do when we encounter them?

Looking at our internal processes and challenging our assumptions requires deliberate attention to the details. Our connectivity projects that implemented chemical, seed, and nutrition B2B messaging didn’t just slap an XML schema onto a nebulous process. We sat down and documented what we did, where we could standardize, and what such standardization and implementation could save in terms of time and costs.

Today, we have partner implementation checklists that members can use in their own connectivity engagements that leverage that learning and enable continued compliance with the business rules and schemas.

Second, it is collaborative. One of the many exciting outcomes from the February Entity ID meeting in Charlotte was that the 50+ attendees each came with their perspectives and needs and left with a greater appreciation of each other’s requirements. The open dialog and willingness to hear and understand other perspectives based on a role in the industry, internal company business process, or technical capabilities is necessary for effective implementation of industry standards.

Not everything can or should be addressed in such a standard. However, where collaborative conversations uncover common ground, and where organizations agree to work together to address a common concern, standards-based data exchange makes sense.

It won’t always be simple; in fact, given the number of stakeholders and wide range of possible uses for entity identification alone, pretending that there is a simple solution that helps the industry communicate better is not helpful. Collaboration recognizes that there is complexity, accepts that, and works to find the path that works for the majority of use cases.

Finally, it is intentional. Each organization that comes to a working group does so with the goal of finding value in the outcome. There’s an intention that the work delivered is useful and implementable. Member companies decide to commit their personnel and their time to these efforts, expecting that the investment will benefit them in some way.

As staff, our commitment to you the members is that we recognize that investment and we will do whatever it takes to facilitate industry work in quick, easily implementable initiatives through the working group process. AgGateway as a whole is driven by member intention, as defined in our strategic plans and annual objectives. We are developing the 2026-2030 strategic plan now and look forward to sharing more details with you in the weeks and months to come.

The more AgGateway members implement, the more efficient the system becomes. Wider use of the standards, resources, identifiers, and development tools you have invested in makes it easier for you to connect to your trading and data service partners. Your advocacy for non-users to become implementers, and for adoption of standards and tools that have been developed – but perhaps not implemented as widely as they could be – enables awareness and opportunity for your organization’s operational efficiencies. Your ability to be “easy to work with,” “customer focused”, and “responsive to market conditions” is often linked to your implementation.

I encourage you to keep bringing your challenges to AgGateway, where we can turn them into opportunities for efficiency together.