CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. – Ceres Solutions has earned the 2022 Business Innovation Award, presented at an industry conference earlier this month through Farm Journal. Ceres earned the award due to the team’s dedication to helping drive new technologies as they work with farmers to gather, manage and utilize business data. As an organization, Ceres has also adopted programs to help elevate efficiency in service, transparency and sustainability for the future.

In this 10-year transformation, Ceres Solutions has applied a clear strategy of digitizing and then automating its business. Ceres Solutions’ seed business served as the starting point. By digitizing its seed business, Ceres Solutions recognized three substantial gains: zero shrink, reduction in overtime and boosted employee morale.

“When the idea was brought to the team,” said Uriah Paddock, Ag Seed Data lead, “I was a hub manager at that point, so I was thinking just how it would benefit my team. But now, having realized the benefits across our entire workflow – it helps everyone focus on the things that need to be focused on.” Product information, pricing, invoices and orders are now all digital.

“Something we do today that I didn’t think was possible 10 years ago is we have a live inventory,” said Clayton Cunningham, seed manager at Crops 63. “As soon as we dispatch something out to a farm, we have a live inventory of what went out, when and where. And then we can pull a report to see what went out that day specifically.” And as for product ordering and delivery, having digital records with manufacturers helps both sides of the business forecast and stay updated on logistics.

Customers have benefitted from the spread of innovation at Ceres. For example, “Our invoicing is much better – more timely, more accurate,” Cunningham said. Ceres has abandoned shared spreadsheets and filing cabinets of paperwork for a paperless, streamlined experience. On the precision side, Ceres has worked to build 2.2 million acres of field boundaries for 450 users in its farm management information system. In 2022, Ceres doubled the number of farm plans it created with farmers.

Matt Clark, who oversees the precision ag and digital support team, said centralizing all the information and data management has streamlined how the business does things from collecting data to analyzing the data to sharing prescriptions. “Our field records used to be in a file drawer,” Clark said. “Now, we’re able to view digital field records, share prescriptions and do everything we need to very quickly.”

He said particularly in the past couple of years, doing business with farmers has changed as they seem to be more likely to engage with business partners digitally.

“We’re looking at things for how it works agronomically, but also how scalable it is and can it easily replicate across our customer base,” Clark said. “We want to be the expert trusted advisor for technology just like we have been for seed, chemical and fertilizer.”