Having the Standard Isn’t Enough, and Maximizing ADAPT Resources

From The President

Having the Standard Isn’t Enough, and Maximizing ADAPT Resources

By Brent Kemp, AgGateway President and CEO

AgGateway member meetings abound in late spring and early summer. AgGateway America Latina met virtually in mid-May and AgGateway in Europe met at John Deere’s Mannheim location for presentations and a factory tour. Our North America Mid-Year Meeting is about a week away as this newsletter goes to press, and I hope to see many of you there. It’s not too late to register and attend.

Several topics important to the industry will be discussed. I’m particularly excited by two: “When the Standard Isn’t the Problem,” and “Your Field Data is Already Doing Half the Job. What About the Other Half?” These member-led sessions focus attention on the first two of our five-year plan watchwords: implement and impact.

The first session addresses “drift” in the way standards are implemented over time. Extraordinary efforts by likeminded companies to develop and implement XML messages in the input supply chain space in the 2000’s continue to be built upon as new connections are made.

But, in the intervening years, ERP changes, business rule modifications, and evolving uses for the exchanged data itself results in incremental changes in the way those messages are implemented today. Versions have changed. Reference identifiers have changed. International terms for commerce and trade have changed. And we suspect the messages as implemented have changed … but not always gone through a formal process to socialize those changes and communicate them to the industry. This session hopes to raise up some of those changes, document them, and result in discussions on the path forward.

Similarly, the second session focuses on the well implemented ADAPT family of resources and what it would take to connect the data generated and exchanged in the field with farm management systems and farmers’ partners. What value could be unlocked if an ag retailer’s system could generate product and job data in a format the field equipment could consume and user? What efficiencies would be uncovered for farmers and farm businesses if the field data they generate could be easily shared with their trusted advisors and partners? What are the technical, business, and socioeconomic hurdles to jump to achieve real data connectivity for agriculture that enables efficient operations, logistics, reporting, and profitability?

There are certainly more great sessions at the Mid-Year Meeting in Altoona, Iowa, USA. Each has the same end goal: to engage participants. Some may result in working groups, others in improvements to the way we run conferences or our standards and tools. AgGateway relies on you, the member volunteers, to bring your best ideas, your business challenges, and your proposed projects, so that we can move the industry forward together. I can’t wait to see you in a few weeks, and if I didn’t mention the session you’re looking forward to most, let me know what it is and why!