AGCO Unifies Operations and Grows Innovation Capabilities Using SAP on AWS

AGCO Corporation, Your Agriculture Company, (NYSE: AGCO), a worldwide manufacturer and distributor of agricultural machinery and precision agriculture technology, is unifying its operations and culture, getting closer to its customers (farmers and dealers), and providing a range of new digital and data-driven customer services. AGCO moved its front and back-office digital infrastructure to AWS. Using AWS, the company has built systems that will allow it to execute its growth strategy in the coming years.

AGCO is a complex business with its range of manufactured farm machinery, services, dispersed corporate operations, and relationships with dealers and farmers. Its hard-working flagship products include smart tractors and combine harvesters that measure fuel consumption and speed, monitor fertilizer type, and perform a host of other functions that help farmers improve efficiency and performance on their farms.

The company, founded in 1990, has operations, offices, factories, and dealership relationships worldwide. Its machinery brands include Fendt, Precision, GSI, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra.

AGCO wanted to consolidate its back-office IT and build closer B2B and B2C relationships with dealers and with farmers, particularly in Europe. The company also wanted to introduce its customers to the next generation of data-powered services and insights to support smarter, better, more efficient, and more compliant farming.

This led the company to move its infrastructure to one place. Now that the company’s systems reside in Amazon Web Services (AWS), AGCO can release software faster and has an environment that supports more rapid innovation.

In particular, AGCO wished to continue using its version of SAP Hybris, which supports the ecommerce part of the business: websites where farmers and dealers can order parts for machines. This is a high-value, high-margin activity for AGCO because parts are relatively easy to manufacture and distribute at scale. Running its systems using AWS gives AGCO the assurance of stability in this area, as the online retail parts business can afford little downtime or room for error.

“Downtime for a farmer can’t happen, especially during harvest, it is critical to have parts delivered on time,” says Laszlo Füri, AGCO’s digital delivery and cloud engineering director, based in Marktoberdorf, Germany.

AGCO has its headquarters in the US and has corporate operations in Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, and the UK. The company has more than 20,000 employees worldwide. The in-house DevOps team currently comprises around 170 people, with half of the team  focused on the back-office ERP systems needed to run the highly sophisticated manufacturing business.

“Today, we have around 30 people internally who are focused on the customer and dealer-facing B2B space,” says Füri. “But 3 years ago, when we began to address digital services for farmers, we needed help.”

AGCO plans to implement more of these services to support what it calls ‘connected machines’, using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and running SAP Hybris on AWS.

The shift to AWS meant AGCO could retain its existing SAP Hybris technology rather than start a new project and a time- and cost-intensive migration to the new cloud version of Hybris. AGCO was also able to reduce costs and advance its ongoing program of corporate simplification, all with zero downtime and no interruption to customer services.

“We were reluctant to be an ‘early bird’ on the SAP SaaS version of Hybris,” says Füri. “Retaining the on-premises version of Hybris and running it on AWS was the best option for us at that time.”

Customers have a responsive, low-latency SAP Commerce web experience, and AGCO has a secure, scalable, cost-effective infrastructure that gives the business greater speed and agility.

“Using AWS, we have simplified and harmonized our infrastructure and operations at the same time,” says Füri. “It has helped us become a more unified company, with a clear understanding of where we are and a vision for where we go next.”