Advanced Grower Solutions Modernized Customer-Facing Apps by Migrating to AWS Cloud

CASE STUDY

5-MINUTE READ

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Our Client

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Advanced Grower Solutions (AGS) is a technology company that provides software solutions to the wholesale nursery and greenhouse market to help growers achieve better results. Their technology brokers the supply chain interaction between individual nurseries and retail chain consumers. Their mission is to help growers achieve better results in their daily operations.

The Challenge at Hand

Increase value added to Nurseries while optimizing internal costs

In an era where technology permeates every facet of human existence, from communication to commerce, agriculture stands as no exception to its transformative influence. AGS’s solutions and products are heavily impacted throughout the season as the demand for agricultural products surges. AGS recognized the need to streamline their operations by maximizing direct store sales to ensure seamless interactions between consumers and suppliers. To meet the escalating needs of their customer – the grower, AGS needed to ensure their infrastructure remained optimized to support their sales channel as well as other value services. Amidst the seasonal ebbs and flows of agricultural cycles, AGS must adapt swiftly to accommodate custom enhancement requests, refine shipping procedures, and expedite invoice submissions. Any lag in hardware performance or response time could disrupt operations and jeopardize customer satisfaction.

Innovative Solutions Unleashed

Accelerated advancement of agricultural technology

Having a sound 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 serve their customers through internal data insights better.

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.

President and CTO of Advanced Grower Solutions, John Beauford, said, “Systems integration is and will be an increasing need as technology use expands. Farms use 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 with 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 the grower’s dock to the store.

Transformative Results Achieved

Greater visibility leads to more opportunities

AGS can now perform more online sales and run their business with greater efficiency. Costs are optimized as the on-prem footprint is reduced. Moving to the cloud meant no servers, no management costs, and no other equipment needed to create a data center.

By migrating to AWS, and 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. Using AWS’s autoscaling technology paired with D3C’s flexible capacity design reduces expenses 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. Depending on the contract subscription, different software can be turned on or off for different customers.

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.

DELIVERABLES	BUSINESS VALUE
CI/CD pipelines for deployments	Increased efficiency and reduced costs
Migration of data and application to the cloud	Increased uptime, faster response time, highly available environment