As we're continuing with our "Powered by flespi" posts, I thought this one shouldn't look like another corporate review topping your news feed. The strongest stance is to let your customers share their success narrative instead of speaking for yourself. Today, we bring you the story of AG info, an innovative company revolutionizing the agricultural industry in the Czech Republic.
Highlights
AG info is a software company specializing in agriculture, creating and delivering solutions that cover nearly every aspect of farming. They assist in complying with various industry rules and regulations while simplifying processes. A few years ago, the company ventured into the telematics field, addressing a gap in the market. Many of their customers used GPS monitoring systems focused primarily on cargo, which lacked agriculture-specific data. That was when AG info came into play. Now, with 30 years of experience in software development, the company is the strongest player in agricultural software in the Czechia.
Challenges
Initially, flespi was a good choice to outsource some “low-level” tasks, such as translating raw data from GPS trackers. Despite exclusively using trackers from a single brand, various models and dedicated firmware versions made it challenging to keep up with protocol updates. The company strove to focus on developing their new product—GPS monitoring for agricultural vehicles—rather than expending energy on these updates. Another requirement was maintaining a reliable, stable, scalable entry point for data collection from all the connected trackers.
But what is GPS monitoring for agricultural vehicles, and what’s the added value? In short, it means tracking tractors, harvesters, sprayers, and more to detect their activities on-site. The all-in-one solution counts hectares covered, time spent, and fuel consumed to provide the complete picture. Continuous monitoring gives customers high efficiency levels, notifying them if a tractor driver spends too much time waiting or drives too fast, which can impact crop growth. Did you know that you have to keep certain speed limits when seeding plants? ;) Otherwise, they won’t grow properly. It’s science and art accompanied by technologies. That was a tough set of tasks to achieve, and they succeeded with no doubt.
Solution
At first, only our basic features were used for data collection, translation, and forwarding it to the company's internal system for further processing. However, as time went by and the number of GPS trackers in their system increased, it became clear that this approach was not easy to scale. They began leveraging advanced flespi features, reworking their data processing approach to offload more tasks to our platform.
Nowadays, their specialists extensively use calculators alongside devices and channels. They switched from processing all incoming messages to processing only important events, like 'trip started', 'trip ended', etc. Furthermore, they use plugins to enhance messages with additional data, whether it’s instant fuel consumption encoded in several message parameters that need to be combined and calculated, or parsing NMEA sentences that could also be in a message when a GPS tracker is connected to a precise external GNSS receiver.
“Flespi comes in handy when dealing with odd, strange, or even faulty device behavior. We can review the device's communication history by filtering a list of messages or inspecting a curve movement on a map. Last but not least, flespi is used for basic device management. When we need to manually adjust some device’s configuration parameter, the easiest way to do it is via the device’s Commands & Settings panel.”
Feedback
Traditionally, we sum it up with a brief feedback but can’t leave this quote out, as it should be addressed personally to our team since our chat remains the main communication channel we use to help you. “We are glad that we don’t talk/write to some random-unified-corporate helpdesk workers, but real developers, thus we can get qualified answers to our problems usually in a couple of minutes.” We appreciate your feedback and will continue to provide instant support whenever you need it!
"Choosing flespi made our entry into the field of telematics easier, and step by step, we are far beyond using it as just a message translator. Or at least I hope :)" / Jan Palas, CTO & Co-owner at AG info