Weaver Popcorn

Challenge

Weaver Popcorn, one of the world’s largest popcorn processors, knew they could do a better job managing their contracted production cycle.  Of particular importance when we first began working together in February, 2011 was the ability to accurately project crop yield so Weaver could make more informed buying decisions.  This was managed through a series of spreadsheets that were populated by field managers and then emailed to a central office.  The time and effort required to manage this data was onerous, to say the least.  What was supposed to be a strategic management decision often felt uncomfortably akin to a moderately educated guess.        

Opportunity

Weaver saw the opportunity to apply cloud-based computing to trace their contracting and scouting activities all the way back to the field level.  By aggregating data from hundreds of farmers across 10,000’s acres, they envisioned a more granular view of the situation, literally from the ground up.  The problem was that the software they desired didn’t exist.  Enter MyFarms.

Approach

We started by working with their field team.  During our design workshop, they described the nuances of their jobs and where the pain points and pitfalls were.  As they described their daily lives, we mapped their current and future business processes in order to methodically identify opportunities to improve.  They had so many ideas we had to establish a three year roadmap to manage the change process, since some suggestions would affect other stakeholders.  Then we developed detailed mockups of every facet of the first generation solution from field boundary definition, to scouting data entry, to aggregated yield projection reports.

Outcome

Today, every field that Weaver contracts is first entered into MyFarms.  After the field to contract association is made, we run a Key Fields algorithm to identify the best set of fields to scout by maximizing the distance between them.  The moment scouting records are saved by the field team anywhere across the Corn Belt, the data sets are instantly included in reports that the management team runs anytime, anywhere to inform grain buying decisions. 

Here is what Will Weaver had to say, “Weaver Popcorn is committed to employing the world’s best technology to assist us in delivering the best popcorn products to more than 80 countries.  After thoroughly evaluating many options, MyFarms was the clear choice.  The MyFarms team brings unique design intuition that only fellow growers can deliver and they are 100% committed to our success.”

Now we're working with Weaver to extend their AS400 application to the field level by automatically passing contract data between our systems.