Argentine agribusiness fyo brings Azure-driven innovation

fyo is an Argentine company with 23 years of experience in the agricultural sector. It's managed to forge a path that allowed it to reach the entire country, forming ties with the most relevant clients and partners in the world of agriculture. The company has become an ecosystem of innovative solutions to help its customers make the best decisions to grow their businesses. Its services span the entire agribusiness chain: grain marketing, futures and options, investments, financing, stockpiling, logistics, supplies, plant nutrition technology, and consulting.

The agricultural sector is one of the most important engines of the Argentine economy, and in recent years fyo has shown considerable growth, so implementing new technologies within its operation has been one of the most favorable business strategies. Leandro Gorrín, Digital Product Leader, explains: "The digital world was always present in our DNA. In 1999, when fyo took its first steps, we developed an agriculture-oriented website. Then we incorporated different services from the commercial chain into one of Argentina's first grain marketers." Today, the company is digitizing its entire business circuit to enhance its relationship with customers.

fyoDigital aims to simplify customers' business transactions. Centralizing all interactions in an online environment, the platform seeks to meet the customer's needs in a personalized manner, offering the right solution at the right time. Gorrin comments, "Agribusiness is one of the sectors with the longest path to go in digitalization. By complementing our business model with technology, we will be able to increase the quality of our customers' experience and expand the scope of our services to more actors in the chain." 

fyoDigital: An innovative platform

fyoDigital, based on Microsoft Azure, offers fyo customers a new way to manage their livestock transactions – online – 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The services provided by the platform include request for quotas (logistics optimization), documentation consultations (contracts and information related to the business), and financial management (consult account movements and manage payments).

As the first digital tool of its kind in the country and in the industry, fyoDigital faced several challenges before it was launched. Pablo Cervio, IT Director at the company, offers an explanation regarding the evolution of the platform: "fyoDigital had an initial version, developed on other technologies. When we subjected it to our testing process, we noticed that we were going to have issues with scaling, and therefore operational continuity of the platform. Those were luxuries we couldn't afford." So the IT team decided to migrate to Microsoft Azure to build a fully hosted application in the cloud to be able to overcome the obstacles. Cervio adds that: "Azure's ability and ease to link services and build resilient applications allows us to focus on generating value for our customers" 

By migrating to Microsoft Azure, fyo was looking to access a range of digital services to build a more robust application and address all the issues it encountered with its previous technology provider. Gabriel Furrer, Service Manager at fyo, adds: "To digitize our external customers, we had to digitize our internal customers first."  To do this, fyo worked on a hybrid and dynamic customer service concept, as it was necessary to guarantee the continuity of its operation even in the midst of the platform transition.

"Working with Azure DevOps allows us to manage our digital product end-to-end. It is a great tool for teams like ours that promote the best agile practices," adds Milagros Mora, Scrum Master at fyoDigital. She went on to add that the solution considerably improved their performance, allowing them to have more fluid communication with other teams that directly or indirectly collaborate with the fyoDigital construction process. "Being able to plan, maintain code, deploy versions, and perform quality testing through DevOps on an ongoing basis makes it a great ally to continue our platform challenges.”

Multidisciplinary teams and over 60 developers using Azure DevOps

The adoption of Microsoft Azure as a cloud provider opened the door to Azure DevOps for the development of "fyoDigital." In the process, fyo used the concept of agile methodology – central to DevOps – that focuses on interactive and incremental software development where the platform evolves over time and according to the project's need. "We organize the roadmap according to the priorities detected in our discovery process. These priorities are frequently reviewed so that we can build the solution that customers require that generates the most value based on the desired impact," the IT Director says.

fyoDigital materialized in 2019 thanks to the teamwork of more than 60 developers and other multidisciplinary teams that are part of the company. With Azure DevOps, software launches have become more organized: teams have been immersed in a shared short-term decision-making process, continuously delivering functionality to customers. "We built different modules on DevOps, which we use to get our developers to interact," explains Furrer. Thus, each member of the IT team uses the solution to develop the different fyoDigital service lines. "We manage our teams based on Azure DevOps and their working methodologies. It's a powerful tool. When implementing it, friction was low and the incorporation was easy," Cervio says.

Referring to the first version of fyoDigital, which is built on technology provided by Microsoft competitors, Cervio states: "Its technology was expensive to scale. We had to decide between facing potential downturns or paying for idle infrastructure. Additionally, the technological stack was not attractive to a labor market as competitive as ours." In contrast, the director highlights the versatility of Microsoft Azure. The ability to integrate between Microsoft's various cloud services, and the cost and process efficiency of scaling them, allows the IT team to focus their time on growing the business, not on managing their digital infrastructure.

"It's interesting because the cost of the platform is proportional to the businesses we generate on it. The platform is mapping the consumption that takes place, which comes directly from the activity we receive from our customers," the IT Director adds. Other Azure solutions that have been implemented, and which are critical to fyoDigital operations, are Azure Functions, SQL Server, Azure Logic Apps, and Azure Monitor.

Run more naturally with Azure Pipelines from Azure DevOps

After much research, development and management, the fyoDigital project using Azure DevOps began to run more naturally due to optimization in code deployments. Using the Azure Pipelines framework, the code is now released into test environments and end environments using partially automated processes, which has optimized the working dynamics among developers and deployment times.

This has been made possible by the "automated testing" team within the IT department, which has focused on creating nearly 400 automated test conditions in platform development. Another advantage of using Azure Pipelines is that they have been able to add the entire testing process as one more step in the execution process. Gorrin says: "That's something we like about what Microsoft has to offer, too. That we can have an independent initiative. We choose a technology that we know we can link to our existing pipelines, which creates more value to what we are doing."

For the future, fyo is looking to upload other lines of service to Azure DevOps to strengthen its digital platform. "With Azure DevOps, we are mapping the different steps of platform creation and construction, focusing and linking all the actors involved in the process of devising new projects," concludes Cervio.