In moving away from its on-premises data lake, the firm is now even better placed to ensure agricultural food security, sustainability

One of the largest plant nutrition and fertilizer firms in Asia, Pupuk Indonesia, delivers the latest smart farming technologies to small farmers across the country, protecting the livelihood and food security of millions of Indonesians.

To power its rapidly growing data infrastructure needs, the firm recently announced it has upgraded from an on-premises data lake to a data cloud service. The former architecture relied heavily on manual labor to set up, configure and manage. Coupled with having only a small team, this made scaling-up difficult, and affected the quality of corporate decisions and pace of innovation.

According to the firm’s project manager for data science Dommy Asfiandy: “In our quest for an efficient and user-friendly data and analytics solution, we made the strategic decision to transition to (a data cloud platform offering) simplicity-of-use and low maintenance requirements that exceeded our expectations. Now our team has experienced an accelerated pace in executing data analytics projects, enabling us to deliver more accurate insights than ever before.”

Now, Pupuk Indonesia can handle the large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data it needs to create highly detailed customer profiling models. They use analytics on data such as plant health, soil conditions, and weather reports to optimize fertilizer and plant nutrient delivery, enabling precision farming for customers. Also, the firm’s full transition to the has democratize data within the organization, with 40 employees being empowered as citizen data analysts. In the near future, the company has set a target of hundreds of new citizen data analysts, a development which will hopefully enable data-driven decision-making across the organization.

Said Satchit Joglekar, Regional Director, Emerging Markets, Snowflake ASEAN, the firm’s data cloud vendor: “Pupuk Indonesia is able to gain valuable insights needed to deliver smart farming services to optimize Indonesia’s agricultural sector and contribute to achieving sustainable food production in the country.”