About Our Research and Development Project

C2B Industry Solutions for AgroIndustrial

Wine Business

The project C2B Industry Solutions for Agroindustrial developed a Wine Business solution and followed a methodology based on three main pillars - Information, Development, and Innovation - to meet the challenges posed to the wine industry from cultivation, through the production process, to the corporate business as a whole:

1 – Information, to inform the elements involved in the project (development team and pilot client) about the challenges imposed by the wine cultivation and production business, the existing business support solutions available on the market, and their strengths and weaknesses. Field visits, follow-up of the processes carried out in the business operation, meetings and interviews with the key elements of business support in the pilot customer, investigation of the business processes of other wine producers, and study of existing solutions in the market were some of the activities that led C2B to the development of the Wine Business solution.

2 – Development, through tests and experimentation, consisted of the definition, architecture, and execution of the solution, the result of the research carried out in the first major pillar of this project. In this phase, a technological analysis of the viability and cost/benefit of using a standard tool of the SAP ERP system was carried out, ERP already in use by our pilot client, which is used by a high percentage of medium-sized/large companies worldwide, which does not make its integration with any other management system unfeasible.

The SAP technologies used are made up of a set of Fiori applications that are Web responsive and based on HTML5, which can be run on any device and thus provide an excellent user experience for the user. All communications with the applications are carried out with OData web services, and the data is stored in the SAP system database, which guarantees security because, as mentioned, this entire solution is developed with SAP technologies and made available to the users through the company's SAP system.

This solution aims at operational optimization, fully integrated with all the business processes of all wine production companies. After the technological definition, the business processes were designed and implemented, followed by laboratory tests with the pilot customer, until final approval and entry into the production system. At this moment, the Wine Business solution is operating at full capacity in the pilot customer's management system since July 2019 with very positive results. This solution, still in the development phase, had the challenge of automating the integration with external devices, namely weighing systems and measurements of quality department control points, speeding up the recording and maintenance of decisive data in the operation's logistics processes.

3 – Innovation, using the latest technologies, procedures, and interactions between today's users and the maintenance of information determinants for business management, the goal was to ease the execution of these tasks. Mobility, ease of movement, without loss of information, and promoting collaboration and efficiency are the key points in the decision of the solution developed.

Framework:

OC2B Industry Solutions for Agroindustrial is an information technology research project that allows the development of a product aimed at process management in the agroindustrial sector applying innovative techniques and supported by the knowledge of our collaborators' technologies and processes by a large company in the sector - Sociedade Vinhos Borges (SVB) - which acts as our research and development partner.

Goals:

The R&D activities consisted in carrying out tests, trials, experimentation, and integration of the solution aimed at validating and demonstrating this technology in the development of new products, in an operational environment, and in a complete system (experimental proof of concept and validation of the technology in a laboratory environment applied to each business process).

It was possible to conclude through the market and internet research that there was a deficit of technological products that supported the management of specific procedures in the agro-food production sector and in particular in Vitiviniculture.

The solutions available on the market for the agricultural sector, in general, demonstrate major weaknesses and inoperability, downtime, low efficiency, and high cost - if on one hand, there is an outdated technology used, on the other there is a persistent mismatch with the usage needs of economic agents who, in addition to increasingly demanding multi-device solutions, are looking for security, flexibility, and extensibility, they want their applications to communicate with each other and especially with already internalized ERP systems and want a type of verticalized solution that runs operations from the treatment of the agricultural land to the marketing of the final product. To date, there is no product that meets these requirements and allows entrepreneurs to opt for an efficient investment.

Our bet was to better understand the specific business processes of the agricultural sector and fill this technological niche with an innovative solution in terms of automatic collection and processing of business information, usability by users, and compliance with the legal formalities inherent to the sector. This activity also aims to carry out a general survey of business processes in the agro-industrial sector specific to the pilot client that would potentially be available to be computerized and improved in the final product under development.

Co-financed and with the support of IAPMEI, FEDER e PT2020