Farmlands Modernizes New Zealand’s Agribusiness Supply Chain with Snowflake
By migrating off its legacy environment, Farmlands unifies its supply chain data, opens up self-serve insights and helps keep New Zealand’s farmers and growers supplied.
6xMore frequent financial reporting, down from 30 minutes to 5
Industry
Retail & Consumer GoodsLocation
Christchurch, New ZealandStory highlights
- Giving the teams behind New Zealand’s farm supply chain a near real-time view of the business: Farmlands’ financial reporting used to refresh every 30 minutes on its legacy environment. Now data from the cooperative’s ERP, CRM and third-party systems lands in one place on Snowflake. Financial reporting refreshes every five minutes, so finance and operations teams track sales, supply chain and customer experience together.
- Freeing branch managers and planners from chasing stock answers with Stockwise: With its data on Snowflake, Farmlands built Stockwise, a Snowflake app that shows stock levels, why each level is where it is and what to adjust. Now branch managers and supply and demand planners can focus on the judgment calls their jobs depend on.
- Turning long-standing reporting into self-serve insights in natural language: Farmlands had years of reporting but not the ability to interrogate it. Now that data from every source system lands in one warehouse on Snowflake, business users can ask questions in plain language and get answers back. The cooperative expects a large share of its Power BI users to switch to Snowflake CoWork over the next year.
Video Transcript
Farmlands is a rural co-operative. We provide agricultural supplies to farmers and growers in New Zealand. Farmlands is here to support everyone connected to our land. Data is crucial to our supply chain. You need to know where products are, when they’re going to arrive and how much they’re going to cost. We’re here helping optimize that.
Farmlands chose to modernize their platforms a number of years ago. One of the core outcomes of that modernization was having access to better data. Snowflake allows us to be able to provide data for sales, supply chain and customer experience. Having our data in the one place near real-time has been a game-changer for our business, and it will continue to be so.
Getting up and running with Snowflake was really easy. Our transformation went really well. We used SnowConvert and AI to actually move really fast from our legacy environment to our new one. We try to be an insights-led organization. We collect data from all our source systems, so being our ERP, being our CRM system, and we collect data from various third-party systems that we then make available in our data warehouse.
We’ve had reporting for a long time, but that true insight with being able to ask natural language questions of the data and getting an accurate, valid response has been amazing. One of the original requirements was for fast financial reporting, moving from a 30-minute cadence to a 5-minute cadence.
We’ve actually moved on from that now into building more Snowflake Intelligent Agents, Cortex Search, and Native Apps, which has been really exciting. One of those particularly exciting things is Stockwise. Stockwise gives people the ability to see what are their levels for adjusting stock, why the stock level is where it is at, and frees up time for our supply planners, demand planners and branch managers to do what is important in their role.
For me, I’m very excited about AI and the opportunities that that brings for us. Snowflake is a really good fit to help us enable AI. We do expect that Snowflake Intelligence is going to be the go-to location for a large percentage of our Power BI users over the next year, so they’ll likely switch from using Power BI to just asking questions in Snowflake Intelligence.
Cortex Code is a really exciting new tool that we’re looking at. Being able to do more machine learning and be able to provide better tools in the hands of our shareholders — it’s phenomenal technology.
Snowflake works really well. It’s really reliable, it’s easy to use, and Snowflake has a large partner network, which makes it really easy for us to securely ingest data and securely share data with others. We’ve found the Snowflake team to be awesome to work with. We have found the Snowflake relationship from presales all the way through to be amazing. We get great response from the team and, yeah, we’ve got a great working relationship and partnership with Snowflake, so they really are a great partner to have.
