An Advanced Growers Solutions Case Study
How D3Clarity architected and migrated on-prem applications and infrastructure to the cloud, increased internal efficiency, and skyrocketed online sales
Advanced Growers Solutions
01 Business Challenge
02 Approach
03 Results
How D3Clarity architected and migrated on-prem applications and infrastructure to the cloud, improved internal efficiency, and skyrocketed online sales
01 Business Challenge - Increase value add to Nurseries while optimizing internal costs
Technology impacts every aspect of our life including agriculture. Advanced Grower Solutions is a leading technology company providing software solutions to the wholesale nursery and greenhouse market. AGS provides technology that brokers the supply chain interaction between individual nurseries and the consumers (big box stores). Their mission is to help growers achieve better results in their daily operations.
With multiple solutions (products), Advanced Grower Solutions needed a way to optimize their infrastructure in order to provide greater value to their customers by increasing direct store sales between the consumers and suppliers.
As a seasonal business, when AGS’s customers (growers) are the busiest, AGS handles custom enhancement requests, increased shipping procedures efficiency and additional invoice submissions. There isn’t room for hardware delays nor poor performance in response time with the increased demand.
02 Approach - Accelerated advancement of agricultural technology
Having a good grower software system should enable both the provider and consumer to have more insight into their operational data. AGS needed to improve their operating foundation as an individual company to better serve their customers through internal data insights.
Advanced Grower Solutions partnered with D3Clarity to architect and migrate their on-prem applications and infrastructure to the cloud. AGS had a vision for their next generation of solutions and how to support various customer interaction channels. D3Clarity elaborated on the initial vision to make it more enterprise-ready with shared services, enhanced security and isolation of production from development to support AGS’s strategic direction.
Leveraging the AWS cloud platform, D3Clarity created the future state architecture within the managed service environment. A CI/CD pipeline was implemented to automate deployments between environments. This allows AGS to manage solution deployments within their own clients. Initial architecture development was completed within a month.
John Beauford, President and CTO of Advanced Grower Solutions said, “Systems integration is and will be an increasing need as technology use expands. Farms use so many technologies and data systems but the integration of and data flow between systems is still a barrier that industry suppliers must come together to address. The role of a systems integrator, who can put together whole solutions for a grower is quickly increasing in importance and opportunity.” D3Clarity and AWS provided AGS a competitive advantage by using the most advanced technology available.
A greater infrastructure capacity and the use of D3Clarity’s manage services allowed AGS to reduce server efforts and provide more resource efforts into creating additional solutions to support their customers including:
- Creating a platform for connecting growers to their EDI trading partners.
- Implementing an online application that tracks products from grower’s dock to store.
03 Results - Greater visibility leads to more opportunities
AGS is now able to perform more online sales and run their business with greater efficiency. Costs are optimized as the on-prem footprint was reduced. Moving to the cloud meant no servers, no management costs and no other equipment needs to create a datacenter.
By migrating to AWS, utilizing advanced security and backup services, growers can feel secure that their data won’t be lost and that the threat of viruses and hackers is minimized. By utilizing AWS’s autoscaling technology paired with D3C’s flexible capacity design, expenses are reduced for AGS and their growers during the slower seasons. The solution scales based on load, allowing companies to grow to fit their needs at any point in time. AGS also has the ability to manage each solution product separately. Different software can be turned on or off for different customers, depending on the contract subscription.
CTO Beauford shared his thoughts about moving to the cloud. “There are numerous benefits to operating your software on the cloud including; improved security and reliability, more flexibility, automated backups, no financial outlay, and excellent connectivity. We were able to achieve a competitive edge by upgrading to the cloud.”
D3Clarity remains a proud AGS partner and continues to govern, grow, support and cost optimize the AGS cloud platform to ensure success.
Contact Info
701 Brazos St. Austin, TX 78701
+1 512-790-DATA (3282)
info@d3clarity.com
