Nutrien Ag Solutions
Seed Recommendation Engine
BACKGROUND
Corn & Soybean Recommendation Engine
Nutrien Ag Solutions is a global producer and retailer of farm inputs. The North American Retail team is comprised of Crop Consultants, sales people with agronomy backgrounds, that recommend and sell crop inputs to growers based on the agronomics of the farm. Crop Consultants provide white glove service through tailored crop recommendations to growers across North America and often cover upwards of 500 miles of territory of grower clients.
BACKGROUND
The Problem
Nutrien relied on fragmented applications with 20+ different forms for sales order entry by their Crop Consultants.. These isolated systems lacked integration, required in-office VPN access and created inconsistent data entry formats, leading to duplicative efforts and manual re-entry across the sales-fulfillment-invoicing lifecycle.
Our field studies revealed an inefficient process, with employees re-entering data a minimum of four times per work order: once on paper, then manually in the logistics system, mixing system, and invoicing software. This highlighted the burden of manual data entry and the lack of data flow automation.
The Solution
Identifying the multi-touch duplication in work order entry presented a significant opportunity to streamline the sales-to-fulfillment-invoicing process. We envisioned a centralized, integrated order entry system enabling:
Real-time data sharing across all user applications.
Enhanced user experience for faster and more accurate order entry.
Mobile accessibility for on-the-go convenience and continuous communication throughout the retail sales cycle.
Our strategic design aimed to orchestrate a seamless flow of data between growers, employees, and all pertinent systems for mixing, loading, and fulfilling work orders. This targeted an 80% reduction in processing time, transforming a 10+ minute process into one completed in 2 minutes or less, and, consequently, expediting order fulfillment.
Project Goals
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Design a workflow that captures the requirements of as many as the current touch points into a single location to reduce duplicative data entry and provide a seamless, simple and logical user experience.
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Our proposed workflow and solution should be available outside of an office or branch so that even while on sales calls, a seamless flow of communication and data can be accessed and entered from the field.
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Our order workflow should take no more than 2-3 minutes to complete and focus on intuitive, smart user experience efficiencies that address current workflow pain points.
The Design Process
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Through a collection of field observation studies, user interviews, stakeholder interviews, usability tests on current applications and system mapping to understand various requirements and integrations, we were able to formulate our first steps and goals for reducing ordering touch points and simplifying order entry.
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Product, Engineering and UX (that’s me!) outlined the scope of work for the project, steps to achieve the defined scope of work for the first phase and future roadmap, created user flows to be validated and ideated initial requirements for testing.
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We validated our goals, ideas and assumptions through multiple rounds of user interviews, stakeholder interviews, and an initial usability test of the task flow for work order entry, the more complicated of the order types to enter and fulfill in current systems.
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After incorporating feedback from initial rounds of testing, I designed high-fidelity comps of the proposed feature end-to-end, also encapsulating how the order would translate to other systems.
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Another round of usability testing followed by user interviews was conducted to ensure we were building the right thing at the right time for our users.
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Design actively participated in engineering ceremonies and completed design reviews to ensure high quality style development, and an intuitive, cohesive and consistent user experience throughout the order workflows.
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After beta testing and initial launch, we have continued to collect user feedback and made incremental improvements to the experience. Additional roadmap items also vetted this process and continue to be delivered today.
Quick Order
Successes & Outcomes
Successes
Positive adoption and success with the field, especially the mobile application
$12 Billion funneled through the application from 2018-2024
Able to reduce five ordering touch points to one
Reduced time to order entry from 10+ minutes to 3 minutes or less
Offline capabilities provided to the field when in rural areas
Designed complex order and work order forms for system integrations and continuous flow of communication between field teams, admin office, ERP systems, field machinery, automated mixing systems, precision ag software
Outcomes and Next Steps
Continuous improvement and iteration
Further buildout of user and customer preferences in order to continue reducing cognitive load of order entry through smart defaults
Further integration to other systems for better data management lifecycle
Utilize data for potential AI or smarter agronomic lifecycles
Further integration of roles - branch managers, growers, anything to enhance business awareness and improve communication between retail partners
Take findings from quick order process to improve other areas of employee application
Roles Involved
Nutrien Stakeholders from Retail & Accounting | 2 Project Managers | 2 Principal UX Designers (That's me!) 3 Tech Leads with 3 Engineering Teams (5-7 engineers and 2 QE's each) | 1 UX Researcher | Digital Adoption (Field IT) | Crop Consultants (Users)