Rural co-operative Farmlands provides agricultural supplies to 75,000 shareholders and customers, who are agriculturalists of all kinds working the land and raising animals. 

The organisation employs more than 1,400 skilled people in 82 stores and has an annual turnover of NZ$2.9 billion. 

Chief Innovation and Technology Officer Richard Wilkinson notes that technology plays a huge key role in that mission and includes things like traceability, genetics, and crop management, as more consumers demand visibility into how their food is produced.

For the past three years, Farmlands - in partnership with Microsoft - delivered a $90 million transformation, replacing older systems with a Microsoft-based technology backbone, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 on Microsoft Azure, and adopted a cloud-first approach.

Farmlands is the result of a merger of two co-ops and the two organisations hadn’t fully integrated into a single culture and the aim was to bring them together through a sweeping digital transformation.

Standing up an e-commece site as pandemic hit

When Covid hit, Farmlands was deemed an essential business, supplying farms with the materials they need to work the land and keep animals alive. 

“Our stores were closed to the public, but we needed to find a way to continue fulfilling orders with no ecommerce site. So, when stores closed, shareholders flocked to phone and email in overwhelming volumes,” says Wilkinson.

Farmlands had to stand up an e-commerce site much faster and sooner than planned. The co-op turned to Datacom and Adobe for help building a click and collect store. The goal was to create something highly secure and functional in less than four weeks, using best-of-breed technology with Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services.

“Getting a minimum viable product up and running with an aggressive timeline was a challenge, and at one point, we had a team of 40 people working on the Click and Collect store,” says Wilkinson

In three and a half weeks, the team built the Click and Collect store from scratch, featuring 2,000 of Farmlands’ highest-selling products. The product information comes from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 system, and Adobe Experience Manager serves the content online.

“The site caught on quick, with hundreds of orders pouring in every day. In just 23 days, the Click and Collect store brought in more than three times more revenue than the previous site did in a whole year,” adds Wilkinson.

Bringing Te Ao Māori to Farmlands

While Wilkinson is a huge advocate for technology at Farmlands, one of his proudest achievements at the organisation has nothing to do with digital or IT.

“When I started with Farmlands, I noticed the lack of any Te ao Māori integration, skills or confidence. I saw this as a real differentiator for our Co-op and the engagement from our Board right through to our store staff has been very humbling,” he explains.

“The program (of which I am the Kaiako or guide) includes everything from Te Reo courses, key translations right through to full Mihi Whakatau for our Māori agri and Iwi shareholders.”