AGRIO

AGRIO is a vertical ERP extension built on top of Microsoft Business Central, purpose-built for the agricultural trade sector. The platform automates the full chain from field to factory — sampling, sorting, transport planning, quality control, and production — for traders and trade houses across Europe dealing in field crops like potatoes and onions. I joined the AGRIO team at Newminds in September 2018, working on the product for three years as both a software engineer and product specialist.

Approach

My role sat at the intersection of product and engineering. On the product side, I worked directly with clients — traders and trade house operators — to understand what they needed, triage problems they encountered, and translate real-world feedback into concrete development priorities. On the engineering side, I implemented those changes in AL inside Business Central, working within a team of seven developers. The cadence was continuous: new feature requests from the field, existing functionality to stabilise, and customer-reported issues to diagnose and fix.

One of the more technically demanding areas was yield forecasting. Estimating a crop’s yield before harvest means reasoning about a range of interdependent variables: field sample data, the percentage of rot in a potato batch, moisture levels, storage conditions. These inputs don’t behave cleanly — they vary by season, by field, by timing in the growth cycle. Building reliable forecast logic required working closely with clients to understand how they actually thought about yield, then encoding that reasoning into calculation models that traders could trust when making high-stakes purchasing and planning decisions.

Solution

Over three years I contributed across a large portion of AGRIO’s feature surface — from forecasting logic to a customs document integration that let clients file EUR1 and CVO certificates directly from within their ERP. Much of the work was unglamorous but high-value: reducing bugs, improving data consistency between modules, and supporting customers through edge cases the software hadn’t anticipated. Working at both the product and engineering layer meant I could close the loop quickly — understanding a client’s complaint in the morning and shipping a fix the same afternoon, rather than having it pass through multiple hands before anyone looked at the code.

Outcome

Over the course of the engagement, AGRIO grew from a capable niche product into a standard solution for agricultural traders across Europe. The yield forecasting module gave traders a structured, reliable basis for decisions that previously relied on rough estimates and accumulated experience. And the time I spent embedded in that dual role — close to clients, close to the codebase — shaped how I think about building domain-specific software: it only works well when you understand the domain as clearly as you understand the code.