Can a farming company build its own Business Intelligence project? It can — and it’s a great thing.
When people hear “Business Intelligence” they think of large companies, dashboards full of charts, big budgets. Noschese reminded us that’s not the case: a farming company too — focused on quality and on its relationships with markets and suppliers — can have its own. You just have to avoid trying to build it all at once.
The starting point
The information was there — production, cash flows, customer and supplier relationships — but it lived in separate places, not talking to each other. Getting an overall picture meant manual work and wasted time. And tackling it all with one big top-down system would have been a double risk: financial, and of rejection by the people.
The choice: small steps
We chose the slow path, which is often the most solid: a series of micro-applications, each solving a concrete piece of the process, designed from the start to merge one day into a single Business Intelligence system. Two reasons, one obvious and one less so:
- Reduce the financial impact: investment follows the real pace of the business, with no big spending in the dark.
- Give people and software time to meet: the team learns to work with the tool while, together, we figure out what’s really needed.
What remained
A system that wasn’t imposed, but grew alongside the company, with the natural integration of its parts. Previously scattered data now organised and accessible, supporting decisions on quality and markets. And investment always proportionate to results.
A bit like a tortoise’s journey: with small, single steps, it knows how to go far.
