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Mission Produce , Davis Cracknell, Kendall Moore, and Salvador Lopez

Bonipak Produce Inc. , Steven Partie, Grant Copeland, and David Minney

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Grocery Outlet Bargain Market I , Mitchell Comstock, Michael Maggipinto, Brendan McIntosh, and Lukas Oswald

Tolosa Vineyards , Adam Cox, Thomas Niland, Jonny Pottorff, and Morgan Brahms

Just Desserts , Daniel Dentoni, Eric Griffen, Jimmy Pallios, and Zane Westmoreland

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Case Study: Double J Dairy , Jay teVelde, Chris Reeves, Holden Smith, and Bradley Braun

Underwood Ranches and Huy Fong Foods: An Exclusive Relationship , Kelsey Wright, Baylie Duncan, Sierra Withrow, and Bryce Yoshimoto

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Shanley Farms: Premium Produce that People Care About , Maggie Andrada, Bryce D’ Arelli, and Melissa Gurvis

Kiler Ridge Olive Oil Farm , David Ayala, Martin Andersen, and Rudy Raimondi

House of Bread Case Study , Audrey Butler, Danica Cramer Danica Cramer, Mackenzie Thesman, and Alicia Warren

Firestone-Walker Brewing Company , Joe Hare, John Fitche, and John Mazzilli

Driscoll's: The Global Brand , Jesus Morales, Edgar Lopez, Noah Lilien, and Jack Stradley

Driscoll's: The Global BrandJe , Jesus Morales, Edgar Lopez, Noah Lilien, and Jack Stradley

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Sustainable agricultural business model: case studies of innovative indian farmers.

1. Introduction

2. key issues of agriculture farming in india, 3. agriculture farming models in india, 3.1. conventional agriculture farming business model, 3.2. sustainable agriculture farming business model, 4. case study methods, case study process, 5. case descriptions, 5.1. btc: within state technology-enabled farming in central pradesh, 5.1.1. context, 5.1.2. business process model, 5.1.3. outcome measures, 5.2. tatkim: regional scale natural farming, 5.2.1. context, 5.2.2. business process model, 5.2.3. outcomes measures, 5.3. the kopi taluk: individual scale natural farming, 5.3.1. context, 5.3.2. business process model, 5.3.3. outcome measures, 5.4. case of dgl: community cooperatives scale natural farming.

• Rainwater harvesting, developing groundwater sources, water rejuvenation and recharge, and creating awareness on water management.
• Green revolution: plantation, maintenance, and encouragement to go green.
• Initiating natural and organic farming and educating the local farming community.

5.4.1. Context

5.4.2. business process model, 5.4.3. outcome measures, 6. implications of the study, 7. limitations of the study, 8. conclusions, recommendations, future research, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Hong, P.; N. L., B.; N., V.; M., S. Sustainable Agricultural Business Model: Case Studies of Innovative Indian Farmers. Sustainability 2022 , 14 , 10242. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610242

Hong P, N. L. B, N. V, M. S. Sustainable Agricultural Business Model: Case Studies of Innovative Indian Farmers. Sustainability . 2022; 14(16):10242. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610242

Hong, Paul, Balasudarsun N. L., Vivek N., and Sathish M. 2022. "Sustainable Agricultural Business Model: Case Studies of Innovative Indian Farmers" Sustainability 14, no. 16: 10242. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610242

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Success of collaboration for sustainable agriculture: a case study meta-analysis

• Open access
• Published: 05 February 2021
• Volume 23 , pages 14619–14641, ( 2021 )

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• Sarah Velten 1 ,
• Nicolas W. Jager 2 &
• Jens Newig 1  

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More and better collaboration between farmers and other stakeholders has repeatedly been identified as a key strategy for sustainable agriculture. However, for collaboration to actually benefit sustainable agriculture certain conditions have to be met. In this paper, we scrutinize the conditions that support or hamper the success of collaborative efforts in the context of sustainable agriculture. For this purpose, we conducted an exploratory case study meta-analysis to consolidate insights from 30 case studies on local and regional collaborative groups for a more sustainable agriculture in the EU. Through multiple regression analysis, we evaluated which factors influence the ‘success’ of such collaboratives. Thereby, we measured success through five explicit and comprehensive success criteria. We found two external, five actor-related, and five organization and management-related factors to decisively influence the different success criteria. Overall, our results highlight that collaboration success requires defining priorities as for each of the success criteria a different set of factors is decisive. Although our results showed trade-offs between the achievement of social and economic goals, it is possible to pursue some success criteria simultaneously. Furthermore, our results give reason to be optimistic about the performance of collaboratives: internal factors, which are in the hand of the collaboratives, are likely to be of greater importance than uncontrollable external conditions. Additionally, conditions encountered at the outset of a collaborative matter less than the way these conditions develop toward later stages. Thus, rather than depending on external and predefined conditions, success largely depends on the agency within the collaboratives.

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1 Introduction

More and better collaboration between farmers and other related actors has repeatedly been identified as a key strategy for sustainable agriculture (Beus and Dunlap 1990 ; Pretty 1995b ; Cobb et al. 1999 ; Warner 2007 ; Velten et al. 2015 ). Collaboration is considered to directly and indirectly contribute to the generation of ecological, social, and economic benefits in agricultural contexts: arguably, collaboration allows for the effective management of natural resources and coordination of farming practices. The reason for this is that it allows acting at scales that are more appropriate to the spatial range of ecological processes than the traditionally targeted field or farm-scales. For instance, if the installation of landscape features is coordinated on a landscape-scale across several farms, habitat connectivity as well as overall landscape complexity can be improved (Donald and Evans 2006 ; Concepción et al. 2008 ; Leventon et al. 2017 ). In the same vein, collaboration can also support the harmonization of multiple objectives. In sum, collaboration may result in a reduction in habitat fragmentation and better connected ecological networks (Uetake 2014 ; Prager 2015 ; Leventon et al. 2017 ). In terms of social outcomes, collaboration is said to increase social interaction and capital beyond the collaborative initiative itself. It thus is supposed to enhance the feeling of belonging within a community as well as the willingness of people to provide advice and mutual support (Ingram et al. 2008 ; Prager 2015 ). Furthermore, it has been argued that collaborative groups have greater negotiation power, are able to realize bigger, joint investments (Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ), and are more likely to receive funding by donor organizations than individual actors (Ramdwar et al. 2013 ). Additionally, collaboration supposedly allows for increased efficiency through minimization and sharing of costs (Uetake 2014 ; Prager 2015 ; Lamichhane et al. 2016 ; Fischer et al. 2018 ). It has also been suggested that collaboration facilitates pooling and sharing of knowledge and capacities (Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ; Shaw et al. 2009 ; Uetake 2014 ), individual and collective learning (Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ; Newig et al. 2019 ), and more legitimate, flexible, and locally relevant solutions (Uetake 2014 ; Prager 2015 ). All of these qualities can further support the generation of social, ecological and economic benefits.

However, collaboration also faces challenges (Uetake 2014 ; Prager 2015 ; Lamichhane et al. 2016 ). Arguably, certain conditions have to be met in order to render collaboration successful. In this paper, we scrutinize the conditions that support or hamper the success of collaborative efforts in the context of sustainable agriculture. In fact, there already exists a noteworthy number of publications that consider conceptually or empirically which conditions affect the success of collaborative initiatives in areas similar to sustainable agriculture. Examples are literature on farmer collaboration for agri-environmental management (Ingram et al. 2008 ; Prager 2015 ), collective action (Ayer 1997 ; Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ; Mills et al. 2011 ) and social networks (Lubell and Fulton 2007 ; Newman and Dale 2007 ). However, the existing literature lacks a specific focus on collaboration in the context of sustainable agriculture (exceptions are Shaw et al. 2009 ; Moschitz et al. 2014 ; Hubeau et al. 2017 ) and investigates only small numbers of cases. Although such in-depth case study research of few cases allows deep insights into causal mechanisms, it does not allow for the identification of overall patterns. Also, generalizability of the results remains critical.

Therefore, in this paper we aim at consolidating insights from a larger number of case studies on collaborative initiatives for a more sustainable agriculture in order to evaluate against explicit and comprehensive success criteria which factors influence the success of such initiatives. Such factors include both external conditions, which cannot be influenced by a collaborative initiative, as well as aspects of composition, organization, and management of collaborative groups. For this purpose, we conducted an exploratory case-meta analysis, also referred to as case survey (Lucas 1974 ; Larsson 1993 ; Newig and Fritsch 2009 ), on local and regional collaborative initiatives for a more sustainable agriculture in the EU. Our approach is exploratory because the research field is dominated by a considerable amount of small-N case studies and evidence is rather scattered. Thus, there is a need for consolidation of knowledge rather than for hypothesis testing. The central feature of the case study meta-analysis is the quantitative coding of variables for each investigated case study. This approach is especially useful here as it allows for statistical analysis of qualitative case study narratives. This, in turn, allows producing findings of broader relevance beyond a single case study.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: the subsequent section introduces the conceptual background of our research. Here, we clarify core concepts of our research and present our analytical framework. Section  3 describes our research methods and case selection. The results of a regression analysis explaining sustainable outcomes by the ‘success factors’ developed previously are presented and discussed in Sects.  4 and 5 . In the final section, we draw conclusions and highlight future research needs.

2 Conceptual background

Below, we first describe our understanding of the core concepts: collaboration and sustainable agriculture. Afterwards, we introduce our analytical framework with its dependent variables (success criteria) and independent variables (success factors).

2.1 Clarification of core concepts

2.1.1 collaboration.

Based on Margerum ( 2011 ), we refer to ‘collaboration’ as an approach to solving complex problems in which a diverse group of autonomous stakeholders makes collective decisions and translates these decisions to tangible results. With that, we only refer to collaboration in the way also Schoon and Cox ( 2018 ) use the term (“working together as a collective entity”) and do not include what they describe as coordination (“conducting individual actions while informing the ‘other’ about what is being done”). Furthermore, we also adopt Margerum’s ( 2011 ) term ‘collaborative’ to describe the groups carrying out collaboration.

2.1.2 Sustainable agriculture

With ‘sustainable agriculture,’ we mean an approach that applies specific strategies in a variety of fields of action in order to achieve sustainability goals in the environmental, economic, and social domains in an integrated way. Strategies for sustainable agriculture can be, for instance, adaptive management, holistic and complex systems thinking, an ecology-based or an economics-based strategy. Such strategies can be applied in diverse fields of action such as the agri-food system, management and technological solutions, or the social, political, and economic environment (Velten et al. 2015 ). Such a broad view of sustainable agriculture allows us to embrace a great variety of collaboratives that contribute to sustainable agriculture. Thus, we address collaboratives ranging from farmer initiatives in search of more sustainable production techniques to agricultural supply chain initiatives with diverse involved actors trying to establish sustainable standards, and to consumer or citizen initiatives seeking ways to support sustainable agriculture.

2.2 Analytical framework

In order to gain an understanding of the kinds of factors that potentially influence the success of collaboratives for a more sustainable agriculture, we conducted a literature review. We looked at conceptual and empirical literature investigating conditions for success of collaborative ventures in the context of agriculture and rural development, especially works investigating sustainability issues more comprehensively and publications focusing specifically on environmental issues. The reviewed literature included works on collaborative common-pool resource institutions (e.g., Ostrom 1990 ; Agrawal 2001 ), farmer collaboration for agri-environmental management (Ingram et al. 2008 ; Prager 2015 ), community-based natural resource management (Measham and Lumbasi 2013 ), collective action (e.g., Ayer 1997 ; Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ; Mills et al. 2011 ), social networks (e.g., Lubell and Fulton 2007 ; Newman and Dale 2007 ), advocacy coalitions (Schlager 1995 ; Sabatier 1988 ), partnerships (Clark 2006 ; Dyer et al. 2013 ), cooperatives (e.g., Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Azadi et al. 2010 ), as well as public policy design related to sustainability and land management (e.g., Cocklin et al. 2007 ; Prager et al. 2011 ).

Based on the reviewed literature, we developed our analytical framework (Fig.  1 ): different kinds of external and internal success factors can impact on the overall success of a collaborative by supporting or hampering different success criteria. While there are likely to be many interconnections and feedback loops among and between the different success factors and success criteria, here we are only interested in the effects of the potential success factors on the different success criteria. The following sections explain the different success factors and success criteria.

Conceptual framework including the different kinds of potential success factors identified in the literature (left side) and success criteria (right side). The arrows show potential influence between success factors and success criteria as well as between external and internal success factors: the continuous arrow shows the relation of interest to the research presented here; the dotted arrows represent other possible relations, which are not of interest to this investigation. Additionally, also interrelations within the groups of internal and external success factors are possible but are not the focus here. *Only relevant for collaboratives that include the implementation of or compliance with legislation. **Only relevant for collaboratives that include the marketing of goods or services

2.2.1 Success of collaboratives for a more sustainable agriculture

In contrast to the great detail on factors influencing the success of collaborative efforts, we found few clear definitions or explanations of how success of a collaborative is understood in the reviewed literature. However, in order to assess the impact of a success factor on the performance of a collaborative, an explicit understanding of the concept of success is necessary. Therefore, by departing from and extending McConnell’s (2010) definition of policy success we derived a list of success criteria (see Velten 2014  for more detail):

Achievement of the social, environmental, and economic goals of a collaborative : Estimation of the extent to which a collaborative was able to realize the objectives it set out to achieve.

Durability : Estimation of the actual or likely endurance of a collaborative and its achievements despite changing conditions (e.g., ceasing of financial support).

Acceptance of a collaborative : Estimation of the extent to which a collaborative itself is supported or opposed by the involved and other affected actors; different from the other measures, this measure is not related to (intended or unintended) tangible outcomes but rather to the way the collaborative operated and achieved its outcomes.

Apart from these criteria, we also deem positive and negative side-effects to be important aspects of the performance of a collaborative. However, they are not in the focus of the research presented here.

2.2.2 Potential success factors for collaboratives for a more sustainable agriculture

The reviewed literature provides a very great number and variety of conditions that can contribute to or hamper the success of collaboratives. These potential success factors can be divided into three main groups: external factors, internal factors related to characteristics of the involved actors, and internal factors related to organization and management of the collaborative itself. Each of these groups comprises a number of sub-groups of thematically related success factors (Table 1 ).

2.3 External success factors

The group of external success factors comprises the factors that may have an influence on the performance of a collaborative but which the collaborative can hardly influence itself. This main group includes, firstly, the specific characteristics of the issue addressed by a collaborative. For instance, smaller and stationary resources are easier to manage than large and mobile resources. These factors stem mainly from literature on collaborative common-pool resource institutions (Wade 1988 ; Ostrom 1990 ; Baland and Platteau 1996 ; Agrawal 2001 ).

Policy characteristics and market-related factors make up the second and third sub-groups of external factors. Policy characteristics are relevant only for collaboratives that are concerned with the implementation of or compliance with policies. For example, a collaborative will be better able to implement or comply with a well-designed policy that matches the specific ecological, political and economic situation of the affected region as well as the capacities of the stakeholders (Cocklin et al. 2007 ). Likewise, market-related factors concern only collaboratives that market any goods or services. Here, moving toward sustainable agriculture and selling sustainable products will be easier for a collaborative in a favorable economic situation with, for example, stable and favorable prices (Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Mburu and Wale 2006 ), high demand (Warner 2007 ; Vuylsteke et al. 2008 ), and little competition (Carlberg et al. 2003 ).

The last sub-group of external factors deals with external conditions and support, i.e., factors that characterize the general environment in which a collaborative is inserted. One part of this is the political environment, for instance the extent to which governments explicitly support and actively encourage collective action (Lamprinopoulou et al. 2006 ; Ramdwar et al. 2013 ). The other aspect of this sub-group is the degree and kind of external support that a collaborative receives. Such support can take the form of financial means, technical knowledge or process facilitation and can be provided by governments or by other sources such as NGOs or private foundations.

2.4 Internal success factors related to characteristics of the involved actors

The internal factors can be influenced by the collaborative itself. For one, such internal factors can relate to the composition and structure of the group of involved actors. This may concern the characteristics of the individual actors involved. For instance, it is deemed more likely that a collaborative will succeed in achieving its objectives if the involved actors possess a high level of knowledge relevant to addressing the issues at hand (Newig et al. 2018 ) as well as pro-environmental attitudes (Lubell and Fulton 2007 ). On the other hand, also characteristics of the whole group of involved actors can matter, such as the size (e.g., Mills et al. 2011 ; Ramdwar et al. 2013 ; Prager 2015 ) and composition of the actor group (e.g., Isaac 2011, Dyer et al. 2013 ; Ramdwar et al. 2013 ), its level of social capital (e.g., Lamprinopoulou et al. 2006 ; Dyer et al. 2013 ; Prager 2015 ), or negative group dynamics such as conflicts (Ramdwar et al. 2013 ).

2.5 Internal success factors related to organization and management of a collaborative

The internal factors related to the way a collaborative is organized and managed relate, on the one hand, to the modus operandi of the collaborative. This includes, among other things, features of the objectives and rules of the collaborative, aspects of leadership, financial questions as well as the ways in which major decisions are taken.

On the other hand, the organization and management of a collaborative encompasses factors related to the way the business of a collaborative is managed. However, these factors are only relevant for collaboratives that engage in business activities. Examples for this kind of factors are the quality of the products offered by a collaborative(Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Azadi et al. 2010 ; Burandt et al. 2013 ), skilled marketing of the goods or services at different markets and application of methods of professional business management (Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Burandt et al. 2013 ) as well as the generation of some surplus, which allows for continued investments in the collaborative (Azadi et al. 2010 ) or even profits (Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Lamprinopoulou et al. 2006 ; Azadi et al. 2010 ).

3.1 The case-study meta-analysis method

The case study meta-analysis, which has also been termed case survey, is especially appropriate for the systematic integration of the insights of a larger number of qualitative case studies (Lucas 1974 ). The basic principle is to transform the qualitative case narratives into quantitative data and thus makes them accessible to quantitative analysis. For this transformation, a predefined coding scheme is used, which consists of a set of questions about the case studies to be answered mostly with numerical values. Thus, the case-study meta-analysis draws on a rich account of diverse case material, devised by different researchers using different research designs and brings them together under a common conceptual framework. While preserving a large amount of detail of individual case studies, the method allows for much wider generalization than single or small-N comparative case studies (Larsson 1993 ; Lucas 1974 ; Newig and Fritsch 2009 ).

Below, we describe each step of the performed case-study meta-analysis: (1) selection of existing case studies that are relevant to the research questions; (2) design of a coding scheme, (3) coding of the selected case studies by expert coders, (4) statistical analysis of the produced data (Larsson 1993 ). Online Resource 1.1 provides a more detailed account of the methodology.

3.2 Case selection and sampling

For this case study meta-analysis, we defined a case as an intervention (initiative, project, putting a legislation into practice, etc .) which is realized on the local or regional level (i.e., any level above farm-level and below national level), which aims at improving the sustainability of agriculture in the concerned locality or region and is carried out in any EU country in collaboration of several actors.

Thus, aside from collaboratives with ambitious objectives and the intention to realize genuine sustainable agriculture we also include collaboratives that seek incremental improvements. There are two reasons for this: first, sustainable agriculture is a very vague and ambiguous concept (Culleton et al. 1994 ) and has been deemed impossible to be defined in a precise and absolute way (Pretty 1995a ). Therefore, it is difficult to assert whether a collaborative does in fact aim at—let alone attain—‘really’ sustainable agriculture. Second, Pretty ( 1999 ) argues that “everyone can take small steps, and small steps added together can bring about big change in the end” (p. 261). Thus, we cannot expect current initiatives to perfectly provide for sustainable agriculture. Instead, we should also value those initiatives that do not necessarily treat all sustainability dimensions equally but aim at improvements of the whole in an integrated and lasting way (Kemp et al. 2005 ). Hence, to be considered a relevant case for our case study meta-analysis, a collaborative may focus on only part of the sustainability dimensions (environment, economy, social) but still needs to pursue its objectives in a way that benefits or at least does not worsen the situation of the remaining, non-focal sustainability dimensions. Key selection criterion is whether there is some evidence that interventions actually aim at sustainability improvements. Cases in which such aims were obviously merely symbolic and not sincere were not included.

In searching for relevant case studies, different internet-based search strategies were used. All publications up to 2014 in English, German, or French were considered. Subsequently, all identified publications were screened with two aims: first, to accomplish the identification and matching of all publications describing the same collaborative because the unit of analysis is an intervention, not a publication (Lucas 1974 ); second, to check whether the described collaboratives indeed matched the definition above and were described in sufficient detail. We identified 50 relevant and usable cases (see Online Resource 1.2). Due to resource constraints and the time-intensive nature of the subsequent step of coding, only a part of these cases could be selected for further analysis. Thus, we drew a random sample of 30 cases, which were located in Germany (7), The Netherlands (5), United Kingdom (5), Italy (5), Austria (3), France (2), Belgium (2), and Czech Republic (1). The development of seven analyzed collaboratives started before 1990, thirteen collaboratives came into existence in the 1990s and the remaining ten collaboratives started out after the turn of the millennium. The earliest case started to develop in 1965 and the latest in 2010. Regarding their spatial level, two collaboratives in the sample acted on municipal or lower level, four collaboratives involved several municipalities, six collaboratives spanned one or several counties, eight collaboratives ranged over one or several sub-national units (e.g., states, provinces), and ten collaboratives focused on a landscape rather than any administrative unit (see Online Resource 1.1, Table A1 for an overview over all analyzed cases).

To illustrate the kinds of analyzed collaboratives, we shortly describe three exemplary cases here: the case of the Upländer Farmer Dairy (Strauch et al.; Knickel et al. 2003 ; Staub 2008 ) began in 1986, when eight organic dairy farmers founded a cooperative in the Upland region in the state of Hesse, Germany. Initially, the cooperative sold their milk to another dairy for processing but for several reasons they opted to buy the recently closed local Upländer Dairy in 1996 and started to process and sell their milk themselves. Rates of increase in turnover and prices paid to farmers were remarkable and as of 2008, the dairy processed the milk of 130 organic dairy farmers, thus enabling and supporting their activities.

In contrast to the bottom-up initiated and purely farmer-led initiative of the Upländer Farmer Dairy, the case of the Gailtal Alp cheese (Rytkönen and Gratzer 2010 ; Borg and Gratzer 2013 ; Gratzer 2013 ) was initiated from the top down and included several types of actors. The case started with the foundation of the “Kärtner Agrarmarketing AG” corporation by the federal state of Carinthia, Austria in 1989. This corporation soon identified the Gailtal Alp cheese as a promising candidate for application for a Protected Denomination of Origin (PDO) at the EU. This cheese was produced with long tradition by fourteen mountain chalets in the administrative district of Hermagor. With the aim of halting the decline of farms and local dairies and protecting a traditional, extensive way of livestock rearing and cheese production, the state-owned corporation initiated local activity groups and networks among different interested local stakeholders. These groups, which included farmers, chalet owners, and local businesses, prepared the application for a PDO. The PDO certificate was granted in 1996. The very small scale cheese production itself is of lesser economic importance for the region. However, an annual festival initiated in 2001 related to cheese and ham from the Gailtal has had great positive effects on tourism, gastronomy and handicraft. Although the state had a very important and proactive role in the beginning of the process, it later shifted responsibilities to the stakeholders.

Different from the two previous examples, the case of the Parish Grasslands Project (Ingram et al. 2008 ; Peterken 2010 , 2013 ) did not include the commercialization of specific products. In the communities of Brockweir, Hewelsfield, and St Briavels in Monmouthshire, UK, the fields of a former common had largely remained in a semi-natural state. These fields were mostly owned by smallholders or local residents who let their fields to farmers based on informal contracts. When the BSE and Food and Mouth disease crises in the end of the 1990’s resulted in increased bureaucracy and restrictions, residents faced breakdown of their informal arrangements that had supported conservation of the landscape. Thus, in 2001 local residents set up a parish organization with the aims of helping residents to maintain their fields as flowery grassland and to increase interest in and knowledge of the surrounding landscape. By engaging in education (lectures, field meetings, school programs, publications), a field-by-field survey, sharing knowledge and advice, and helping field owners to enter agri-environment schemes, the intervention has created a community network of local people (residents, farmers, smallholders), who want to manage and maintain their fields for biodiversity benefits.

3.3 Coding scheme

The coding scheme (see Online Resource 2) contains precise and operable definitions of the key concepts to be analyzed. These are (a) the kinds and ambitiousness of the environmental, economic, and social goals of a collaborative; (b) the dependent variables (success criteria); (c) the independent variables (success factors). Included in the latter were all factors retrieved from the reviewed literature (see Sect. 2.2.2 ). Moreover, the coding scheme includes control variables capturing information about the available publications describing the case (e.g., involvement/neutrality of the authors) as well as information characterizing the collaborative (e.g., start year, multi-level aspects, involved actors).

Some of the identified success factors can vary significantly during the trajectory of a collaborative (e.g., trust). However, the literature provides little clarity as to the point in time at which they matter most. For this reason, these success factors were translated into two variables: one evaluates the presence of the factor at the outset of a collaborative, the other variable does the same at the latest known point in time.

Most variables in the coding scheme are questions about the case at hand and are usually answered with a numeric code. Answers are mostly expressed on a metric scale from 0 to 4, similar to a five-point Likert-scale. Additionally, the coding scheme requires for all variables a code expressing the degree of reliability of information on which the answer is based. These reliability codes range from 0 meaning ‘insufficient information available’ to 3 meaning ‘explicit, detailed and reliable information available.’

3.4 Coding procedure

After a pre-test, coding of the case studies was shared between the first author and a student assistant. The case studies were mainly coded by only one of the coders. Seven case studies were coded by both coders in order to compare coding results, discuss strong deviations, and adjust coding if needed (cf. Lucas 1974 ). Afterwards, both code lists were consolidated into one code list by calculating the weighted means of the codes, using the reliability values as weights. Moreover, interrater agreement was determined with an average r wg value (James et al. 1984 ) of 0.86 across all variables (standard deviation 0.17). With that, interrater agreement was at an appropriate level, indicating a high degree of agreement. Additionally, for the cases coded by one coder, steps were taken to increase reliability of the codes, such as cross-check of the codes by the other coder.

3.5 Data preparation and analysis

The aim of our analysis was to determine which of the independent variables (representing success factors) have decisive effects on which dependent variables (representing success criteria).

We applied a stepwise exploratory approach to reduce complexity and arrive at robust and interpretable results. As a first step, we simplified and aggregated the measured constructs by means of principal component analyses (PCA) with oblique rotation (promax). We performed the PCA on conceptually related variable subsets within each of the success factor sub-groups (see Sect. 2.2.2 ). Where feasible, PCA integrates the variables into a smaller number of components, which represent more general constructs. Thus, PCA is able to reduce the dataset without losing much of the information provided by the original variables. All analyses were evaluated using Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measures for sampling adequacy and Bartlett’s test of sphericity, which for all analyses yielded acceptable results. All resulting constructs have acceptable reliability, with Cronbach’s Alpha of at least 0.74 (for more information see Online Resource 1.3). Additionally, for the factors that can vary strongly over time, we calculated the differences between the variables evaluating these factors at the beginning of the collaboratives and at the latest known point in time. This way, additional variables representing the change of these factors over time were created.

Second, we mapped potential relations between dependent and independent variables by means of correlation analyses. We used Spearman’s rank correlations to detect possible correlations. We checked all correlations for confounders by calculating partial correlations with the control variables contained in the coding scheme. This procedure provided a robust overview over covariance structures in our dataset and facilitated subsequent variable selection for regression models.

Finally, we performed multiple regression in order to assess in a broader estimation which of the selected success factors impact on which success criteria. For the regression models, all independent variables were considered that proved to have a significant and robust relation with one of the dependent variables. Due to the small sample size, models were restricted to a maximum of four variables. Therefore, we assessed different models with varying combinations of variables from at least two of the major factor groups (external, internal actor-related, internal management-related). We evaluated the regression models regarding the assumptions of normality, linearity, multicollinearity, and homoscedasticity to evaluate their generalizability. We finally selected those models with the smallest value of the Akaike information criterion (AIC). In order to check the robustness of our results, we additionally performed robust regression using iteratively re-weighted least squares.

A list of the frequency, mean values, and standard deviations of all independent variables included in the regression models as well as success criteria ratings of the different cases are provided in Online Resource1.4. PCA proved feasible for numerous groups of related variables. Therefore, many of the variables included in the regression models are aggregates of several individual variables. Due to a high amount of missing values in the independent variables, all of our regression models are based on 19–22 cases.

The following sections present the modeling results (see Online Resource 1.5 for a detailed regression table, Online Resource 1.6 for the assessment of assumptions of the different models, and Online Resource 1.7 for the results of the robust regression). Our models contain different sets of variables. There are two reaons for that: Firstly, we restricted our models to contain a maximum of four variables and, secondly, we selected for each dependent variable the combination of independent variables that makes up the model with the smallest AIC. Figure  2 presents an overview of the regression models, showing which factors influence which success criterion.

Impacts of the significant success factors on the different success criteria. Continuous arrows represent positive effects, dashed arrows negative effects. The asterisks indicate the level of significance of the correlation: * p  < 0.1, ** p  < 0.05, *** p  < 0.01. For those factors that could vary over time, the information in brackets tells at which point the factors were decisive: “end” indicates the status of the factor at the latest point in time, “difference” indicates the difference of the values of the factor between the outset of the collaborative and the latest known point in time. For the factor ‘characteristics of the addressed issue,’ which the PCA identified to be an overarching concept made up of several aspects, it is important to understand in which way its different aspects affect the achievement of social goals. Therefore, for this factor, the effects of its single aspects are shown

4.1 Factors influencing success of a collaborative in terms of the achievement of its goals

All of the models explaining the achievement of the different kinds of goals present very high regression coefficients (adjusted R-square between 0.58 and 0.62). Thus, they cover a very large proportion of the variance of the respective success dimensions.

According to our results, for the achievement of the social goals of a collaborative the characteristics of the addressed issues and the involved actors’ devotion to the collaborative at the latest known point in time are especially relevant. The characteristics of the addressed issue were summarized into a single factor of through PCA. However, they impact differently on the achievement of social goals: it is beneficial for the achievement of social goals if the addressed issues can be characterized as a public good or co-production of benefits-problem (which is, for example, the generation of positive environmental outcomes along with increased revenues); if the benefits of the issue cannot be stored (which is the case, e.g., for clean air or the beauty of a landscape, which are typical public goods); and if the issue is of less importance to the involved actors, that is if they are not dependent on the solution of the issue. Also, the involved actors’ devotion is a PCA factor containing actors’ loyalty to and satisfaction with their collaborative, their motivation to participate actively, and their general environmental values and general commitment to collaborative principles. The model contains an additional variable, which is the sufficiency of overall financial resources (see Online Resource 1.5). However, this variable does not show a robust significant effect as the confidence interval of this variable contains zero. Robust regression confirmed this model with the difference that the best model obtained through robust regression contained one additional, yet non-significant variable (see Online Resource 1.6).

When it comes to the achievement of environmental goals, a collaborative is more likely to achieve these goals the more the involved actors get to trust each other toward the later stages of the collaborative and the more the sufficiency of the overall available financial resources improves over time. Thereby, ‘sufficiency’ means ‘having enough to carry out the tasks and functions of the collaborative'. Also relevant for the achievement of environmental goals are pre-existing relations among the actors involved in a collaborative. However, here only the minimum values of pre-existing relations showed a correlation with the achievement of environmental goals and not, for example, the average value. Therefore, what is important is a high baseline of pre-existing relations, i.e., it is favorable if all involved actors already knew each other beforehand, even if it was just to some extent. In case of the achievement of environmental goals, robust regression confirmed our results without any deviances.

The relevant factors supporting the achievement of economic goals are professional business management and the attractiveness of a collaborative to the involved actors. Also, these two factors were obtained through PCA and therefore contain several aspects. Professional business management comprises competence in marketing the goods or services of a collaborative at different markets and through different marketing channels, as well as the application of methods of professional business management. The attractiveness of a collaborative is increased if it pursues a narrow, focused set of goals which favor individual rather than collective goals. The creation of incentives to pursue the objectives of the collaborative and incentives to collaborate rather than to act individually further increase the attractiveness of the collaborative. An additional relevant factor for the achievement of the economic goals is a high demand for the products of a collaborative at the latest known point in time. For the achievement of the economic goals, robust regression suggested a model with three different variables as the best fitting model (existence of criteria to determine membership eligibility, continuous investments into the collaborative, and common identities of the involved actors, see Online Resource 1.7). Difference in AIC between the model suggested through normal linear regression and the model retrieved through robust regression is relatively small (41.58 and 40.95, respectively) and on conceptual grounds, the model obtained with linear regression is more meaningful. For these reasons, we decided to keep the model determined through linear regression as the best fitting model.

4.2 Factors influencing success of a collaborative in terms of the durability of its achievements

Also, in case of the durability of the achievements of a collaborative, the regression model accounts for a very large proportion of the variance (adjusted R square of 0.66). The model deems the following factors relevant: continued investments in the collaborative (e.g., into infrastructure, marketing campaigns, training, etc.) and a network of relations among the involved actors that increases in its density over time. The latter means that the involved actors establish more relations among each other as the collaborative develops. Also, this model contains an additional variable with p  > 0.1 whose confidence interval contains zero and whose correlation coefficient is therefore not significant (knowledge of the involved actors about the addressed issue). Robust regression confirmed these results.

4.3 Acceptance of a collaborative

Compared to the aforementioned regression models, the model for the acceptance of collaboratives covers a low proportion of the variance (adjusted R squared of 0.24). The model indicates that two factors are decisive in influencing the acceptance of a collaborative itself: a collaborative is better accepted if level of conflict between the involved actors is low at later stages of the collaborative. If the collaborative markets any goods or services at all, also products and services of clear and unique identity as well as high quality contribute to the acceptance of the collaborative. Robust regression confirmed our results.

5 Discussion

5.1 discussion of the results.

First and foremost, our results show that there is no “silver bullet factor” which alone could ensure wholesale success: although we assessed in a multi-step procedure all variables of our coding scheme for their influence on the different success criteria, no single success factor proved to have a significant impact on all success criteria. Thus, for each success criterion a different set of factors is decisive. This is in line with findings and considerations in the literature we reviewed on collaborative arrangements in areas related to sustainable agriculture. Instead of one factor or a small selection of factors, also these works identify a diverse range of factors to be decisive for the performance of a collaborative (e.g., Agrawal 2001 ; Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ; Lamprinopoulou et al. 2006 ; Cocklin et al. 2007 ; Azadi et al. 2010 ; Measham and Lumbasi 2013 ).

Perhaps the most important finding on a more general level is that more internal factors than external factors show an impact on the success of a collaborative (we identified ten internal factors and two external factors, see Fig.  2 ). Thus, we conclude with some caution that the performance of a collaborative is largely in the hands of the collaborative and its actors, and only to a lesser degree determined by external circumstances.

Furthermore, our results uncover a trade-off between social goals and economic achievements. For the achievement of economic goals, it is favorable if the collaborative pursues objectives that are of high relevance to the involved actors (Measham and Lumbasi 2013 ; Dyer et al. 2013 ) and contribute to the involved actors’ individual self-interest rather than to collective goals (Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ). In contrast, the achievement of social goals is more likely if the involved actors are little dependent on the addressed issue and therefore have weak individual interest in the issue. It strikes that this is in contrast to the literature on collaborative common-pool resource institutions, which argues that high dependence of group members on the managed resource facilitates group success (Agrawal 2001 ). The achievement of social goals is further supported if the collaborative addresses a public good issue (Ayer 1997 ), which are of collective rather than of individual interest. This finding shows that collaboratives that put a greater focus on either economic or social achievements are more likely to succeed. However, at the same time we did not find any trade-off between environmental and the other goals. Thus, while a collaborative may need to decide whether social or economic goals are of greater importance, it may be possible to achieve environmental goals along with economic and social goals.

Additionally, our results highlight the importance of success factors related to business and finances as they are central for many different success criteria: If a collaborative includes the marketing of goods or services, it is important that business and marketing are carried out in a professional way (Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Burandt et al. 2013 ). This entails assuring that the offered products or services have a unique identity (Roest and Menghi 2000 ; Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Lamprinopoulou et al. 2006 ) and are of good quality (Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Azadi et al. 2010 ; Burandt et al. 2013 ). Furthermore, availability of sufficient financial means (Azadi et al. 2010 ; Burandt et al. 2013 ) facilitates the achievement of environmental goals. Meanwhile, continued investments into the collaborative can increase the durability of the collaborative (Azadi et al. 2010 ). On first sight, these findings seem to be rather self-evident, especially the importance of business and finance-related factors for economic achievements. However, these findings tell an important lesson: for initiatives aiming at the improvement of the sustainability of agriculture, pure idealism is not sufficient. Also, classic economic criteria have to be taken into account to support a collaborative in achieving all of its goals in a durable way. Yet, as the generation of surplus profits did not prove to be a decisive factor in our analysis, the main focus regarding these financial aspects is on economic viability rather than on maximizing profitability. Thus, what matters is having enough means available for the collaborative to carry out its functions and to make continuous investments to improve its operations.

For success factors that can vary to a great extend over the trajectory of a collaborative, we assessed their status at the beginning of the collaborative, at the latest known point in time, and their change over time. Therefore, our analysis provides more detail about the point at which these factors are crucial. In case of the factor of network density of the group of involved actors (Isaac 2012 ), we found that what matters is its change over time. For the factors of general demand for the types of products offered by a collaborative (Carlberg et al. 2003 ; Mburu and Wale 2006 ), group members’ devotedness to the collaborative (Oerlemans and Assouline 2004 ; Lamprinopoulou et al. 2006 ; Bhuyan 2007 ; Azadi et al. 2010 ), the trust (Mburu and Wale 2006 ; Azadi et al. 2010 ; Dyer et al. 2013 ; Prager 2015 ), and conflict between them (Ramdwar et al. 2013 ), our results show that their status at the latest known point in time matters. However, our results do not reflect cases of collaboratives that do not even take off due to, e.g., strong distrust, conflict or the absence of commitment and motivation for a cause because such cases are rarely reported. Thus, while we need to keep in mind that completely adverse initial conditions might impede a collaborative from taking off, success of a collaborative for a more sustainable agriculture seems to depend less on the conditions encountered at its outset and rather on the way it develops over time.

What is more, our results also shed some light on the conceptually ambivalent effects of the factor of network density. It has been argued that highly dense networks of relations among the involved actors facilitate collective action but provide little new information. In contrast, in less dense networks new information can become available and facilitate innovation, but this information may be difficult to diffuse through the network (Isaac 2012 ). Our results highlight that it is not the absolute network density but rather an increase in network density over time that matters for the durability of a collaborative and its achievements. Thus, one can say that durable collaboratives manage to consolidate their relationships over time. This finding is in line with findings from Berardo and Scholz ( 2010 ): they posit that actors in newly emerging policy arenas seek to establish relations with prominent partners in order to discover collaborative possibilities. This process creates high bridging capital in a network, which allows for efficient information exchange and is a characteristic of loose networks. However, as the policy arena matures, the advantages of bridging capital fade and bonding capital becomes more important. In this process, the number of strong ties as well as the level of reciprocity increase and allow addressing more complex cooperation problems by providing credibility.

5.2 Methodological reflection

Despite great care in the design and execution of the present analysis, it does present a number of challenges: while a systematic investigation of a larger number of different kinds of cases such as ours allows for insights in general patterns, it also results in a loss of information and detail. What is more, although the number of case studies that we investigated is considerably larger than in similar previous studies, it still is rather small for a study using statistical methods for data analysis. Thus, our results are mainly of explorative character and only offer first insights. Related to this is also the problem of missing values: Although we screened the case material to assure an appropriate level of available information on the different cases, missing values were still an issue for numerous variables. In consequence, variables with many missing values could not be considered in the statistical analysis. Thus, important influencing factors could be missing from our results.

Additionally, specific biases may pose limitations to our study. First, being based on the analysis of published material, our study is prone to a publication bias, which is the tendency to primarily report on successful cases and results with large effect sizes (cf. Cooper et al. 1997 ). However, our approach to evaluate the performance of the different case studies against multiple success criteria may attenuate the effect of the publication bias in two ways: first, a collaborative that is rather successful according to the success criteria applied by the authors of the original publication may perform less well if evaluated against our success criteria. Thus, using our own set of success criteria makes it more likely that our analysis includes also less successful examples of collaboratives. Second, a collaborative may perform differently with respect to the different success criteria. Therefore, the fact that we apply multiple success criteria makes it more likely that our analysis represents collaboratives with different kinds and degrees of success. A second source of bias can be the subjective numeric interpretation of qualitative information through individuals (rater bias). In face of this bias, we realized steps to align the coding decisions of the involved coders and checked for interrater agreement, which we found to be at an appropriate level (see Sect.  3.4 ). Still, rater bias should be noted as a possible limitation.

Last but not least, there are limits to capturing and quantifying complex social processes and phenomena such as trust and values held by actors, especially when one has to rely on second-hand information for this purpose. We addressed this challenge by taking steps to align coder decisions, controlling for biases and reliability of the information on which the coding decisions were based, and by reporting transparently on our approach.

6 Conclusions

In this paper, we aimed at assessing which factors influence the success of local and regional collaboratives for a more sustainable agriculture. To this end, we conducted a case study meta-analysis of 30 collaboratives from different EU countries. We considered a wide range of factors suggested to be relevant in the related literature. Our results provide insights not only on the kinds of decisive success factors and the ways they impact on the success of collaboratives (i.e., which success criteria they affect) but also regarding the stage at which certain factors play a role.

Overall, our results show that there is no silver bullet: for each success criterion (achievement of ecological, social, economic goals; durability; acceptance), a different set of factors is decisive. Consequently, there is no selection of factors that, if addressed adequately, could ensure wholesale success for a collaborative. However, while we identified a trade-off between social goals and economic benefits, we did not find a trade-off between environmental and the other goals. What is more, we found several aspects related to finances and business management to contribute to almost all success criteria. In sum, our results show that there is no simple way to achieve overall success, but it is possible for collaboratives to pursue many different success criteria simultaneously. Importantly, our results show that collaboratives need to keep an eye on their economic viability (i.e., the ability to sustain itself financially) as it is a precondition for overall success: if a collaborative cannot continue due to lacking economic viability, it can no longer deliver as well in an ecological or social sense.

Furthermore, our results give reason to be optimistic about the performance of collaboratives: internal factors, i.e., the way collaboratives are composed and managed, are likely to have greater influence on the performance as uncontrollable external conditions. For our selection of cases, which all overcame an initial phase and reached some sort of maturity, conditions encountered at the outset of a collaborative seem to matter less than the way these conditions develop toward later stages. Also, the process of actors growing together, which is reflected in an increasingly dense network of relations, helps the collaborative and its achievements to persist. Therefore, rather than depending on external and predefined conditions, success rather is a result of the agency within the collaboratives. Thus, our results suggest that it is likely to be worthwhile for the initiators of a (soon to be) collaborative to invest the resources to get the collaborative started, even if initial conditions are less than optimal. However, in order to persist and be successful in the long term, collaboratives need to take care to bring actors closer together, build trust between them, keep them motivated for the cause of the collaborative, and avoid or actively resolve emerging conflicts.

Despite this positive outlook, we point out that even the most successful collaborative arrangement is never entirely perfect (Mfune 2014 ) and that collaboration is not a panacea. This implies that the feasibility and usefulness of establishing a collaborative have to be carefully pondered in each situation (Emerson and Nabatchi 2015 ).

Our results contribute to clarifying which factors are especially important for the success of collaboratives for a more sustainable agriculture. However, we also highlight that our study presents certain challenges that could be overcome in future research. To overcome the challenges related to the rather small size of our sample characterized by a great variety of collaboratives, future research could conduct an analysis similar to the one described here on a larger set of case studies or on more homogenous sets of collaboratives, e.g., just on farmer cooperatives or just on multi-stakeholder initiatives. Furthermore, with its essentially nomothetic approach our analysis tells little about the causal mechanisms through which the identified relevant factors influence the success of a collaborative. Therefore, we recommend in line with Goertz ( 2017 ) to combine the case study meta-analysis with thorough within-case inference in order to identify the causal mechanisms underlying the statistical relations found here.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Edward Challies and Pim Derwort for volunteering to pre-test the coding scheme; Hanna Weber for her substantial contribution in coding the case studies; Stephanie Jahn for her expertise on the statistical analysis of the data; as well as Julia Leventon for her overall conceptual advice and input. Many thanks to five anonymous reviewers whose suggestions greatly improved earlier versions of this manuscript.

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This work received funding by the ERA NET project MULTAGRI, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 033RA01B, and by the Innovation-Incubator at Leuphana University, TM 1.4 Graduate School.

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Velten, S., Jager, N.W. & Newig, J. Success of collaboration for sustainable agriculture: a case study meta-analysis. Environ Dev Sustain 23 , 14619–14641 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-021-01261-y

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Making Small Farms More Sustainable — and Profitable

by Lino Miguel Dias , Robert S. Kaplan and Harmanpreet Singh

Summary .   

Smallholder farms provide a large proportion of food supply in developing economies, but 40% of these farmers live on less than U.S.$2/day.  With a rapidly growing global population it is imperative to improve the productivity and security of farmers making up this sector.  This article presents the results of Better Life Farming, an ecosystem that connects smallholder farmers in India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh to the capabilities, products, and services of corporations and NGOs.

More than 2 billion people currently live on about 550 million small farms, with 40% of them on incomes of less than U.S. $2 per day. Despite high rates of poverty and malnutrition, these smallholders produce food for more than 50% of the population in low-and middle-income countries, and they have to be part of any solution for achieving the 50% higher food production required to feed the world’s projected 2050 population of nearly 10 billion people.

Partner Center

This international agribusiness annually handles millions of tons of commodities—but its ambitions to accelerate growth of its integrated global agriculture supply chain were impeded by 100 isolated back-office systems. The company engaged IBM Services® to deploy integrated SAP solutions that deliver unified data insight, driving efficiency and growth.

This multi-billion-dollar agribusiness aimed to drive fast growth whilst reducing headcount—but acquired legacy systems stood in the way.

The business worked with IBM Services to transform its core application landscape, powered by integrated SAP solutions, including SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.

a lean team to drive a multi-billion-dollar business, facilitating growth

This agribusiness has set its sights on global leadership, and aims to become one of the five largest players in the industry.

The company operates through multiple legal entities across many countries. Many of these entities were the result of several acquisitions, each with their own legacy processes and independent IT systems.

A spokesperson for the agribusiness explains, “After acquiring two medium-sized companies, our business volumes grew rapidly and annual revenues climbed dramatically. Despite that change, we’ve remained a lean organization.”

The spokesperson continues, “We knew that it would be impossible to achieve fast growth with so many different legacy systems resulting in different sets of business data, hampering efficiency and ultimately slowing down our decision-making. To solve the challenge, we looked for a new approach.”

The company was confident that consolidating its legacy business systems would bring far-reaching benefits. By centralizing the delivery of IT services, the company could decommission costly on-premises data center infrastructure, resulting in an immediate reduction in operational costs. Most importantly, the move to a harmonized way of working would enable the company to harness a single source of business data to unlock efficiencies in human resources, procurement, financial accounting and more—vital to drive global growth with a limited headcount.

To maximize the synergies with other parts of its organization that also rely on SAP solutions, the agribusiness decided to move to  SAP S/4HANA  and SAP Master Data Governance. Combined with SAP Ariba (an end-to-end procurement solution that includes supplier lifecycle management, contract management and strategic sourcing capabilities),  SAP SuccessFactors  for human resource management, and SAP Concur for travel and expense management, the solutions enable unified global operations based on a single, enterprise-wide data foundation. 

The spokesperson elaborates, “We wanted a single global platform that would support us in the long term and enhance our ties with the rest of the group. By choosing a long-established vendor with a proven track-record of success in our industry, that’s precisely what we’ve gained.”

For flexibility, scalability, and cost optimization, the enterprise chose to deploy SAP S/4HANA and SAP Master Data Governance on  Microsoft Azure .

The spokesperson says, “By selecting cutting-edge SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, we were confident that we could harness native integration with cloud platforms such as SAP Ariba to reduce the complexity and duration of the implementation process. We also saw great benefit in embracing the SAP Fiori user experience, particularly as enterprise mobility is a key aspiration for the next phase of our business transformation journey.”

To turn its vision for a global back-office process template into a reality, the agribusiness engaged  IBM Services  to drive its business transformation project.

The spokesperson explains, “After a thorough vendor evaluation process, IBM Services stood out as the clear leader. IBM had previously worked to deploy SAP ERP solutions to one of our subsidiaries, so they already had a solid working knowledge of our business processes, culture and commodities trading systems in the front office. 

“These insights proved to be a solid foundation for the project, and IBM Services gave us the confidence that we would be able to move quickly to meet our aggressive target for the SAP solution deployment. Equally, the close strategic partnership between IBM and SAP assured us that both companies would be able to resolve any technical challenges along the way quickly and effectively.”

IBM Services recommended the IBM Ascend for SAP Application Development methodology for the transformation project. This phased approach guides companies through iterative stages of exploration, requirements-gathering, gap analysis and process design. With the exception of the SAP Concur deployment, which was to be managed as a separate internal project, the agribusiness worked closely with IBM Services on the SAP solution implementation process.

In conjunction with the IBM Ascend methodology, IBM used IBM IMPACT—a collection of tools and best practices that help to accelerate SAP deployments. Using the IMPACT toolset, IBM made an instance of SAP S/4HANA available in a sandbox environment from the earliest stage of the design process. As well as helping to engage business users from the outset, the IBM IMPACT toolset empowered the project team to quickly understand which SAP solution functionality it could use straight out of the box, and which areas would require custom development. 

Using IBM Blueworks Live, a component of the IBM IMPACT toolset, IBM Services enabled the company to accelerate the business process modelling process using best practice templates and powerful data visualizations.

“The agile approach, IBM Ascend methodology and IBM IMPACT toolset that IBM brought to the transformation initiative created an environment where teams from across the global business could freely share expertise and insights with their peers in other regions and geographies,” adds the spokesperson. “By assigning global business process owners and forming a new process advisory council, we gathered requirements and best practices with the involvement of employees from across the organization—and together we have designed our new global processes.”

Thanks to its agile approach from earliest phase of the design process, the agribusiness completed its global back-office template in less than eight months and worked with IBM to deploy SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure for an initial pilot project. In parallel, the company rolled out SAP Ariba procurement and contract management solutions to user communities in a number of global regions. 

The spokesperson comments, “We hadn’t experienced a global project of this scale before. Having IBM Services as our trusted advisor was, and continues to be, extremely helpful. The IBM team has more experience of similar projects, and were therefore able to provide guidance on the framework for our internal discussions, suggest best practices, and brainstorm our design options with us, when needed.

“Happily, our first year of SAP deployments went very smoothly, and the solutions are now supporting one of our largest business units by revenue. This success gives the team a great deal of confidence that our designs are correct, and this boost is extremely important as we widen our scope to deploy the SAP solutions to the next wave of countries in 2020 and 2021.”

The company is confident that SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure will enable it to stay lean, continue its fast-paced global growth, and ultimately continue to compete as a world-class agribusiness.

The spokesperson elaborates, “The transformation initiative is already making fundamental changes to the way that we work, and we have no doubt that the transformation journey we’re on with IBM Services will have a powerful, positive impact on our operational efficiency. 

“For example, by moving a single chart of accounts in SAP S/4HANA, we will create opportunities to automate transaction processing and enhance our month- and year-end closing cycles. The efficiency improvements won’t be limited to our finance function. We recently opened a new center of excellence [CoE], which is already delivering sourcing and procurement services to our business using SAP Ariba. Looking ahead, we plan to centralize many of our back-office processes to the CoE, including human resources administration, expenses management, recruitment, and accounting—all managed using SAP solutions.”

As the agribusiness moves more of its business processes to SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure and cloud services such as SAP SuccessFactors, it will decommission much of its on-premises infrastructure. This process is designed to reduce operational costs and enable IT personnel to focus on higher-value work.

The company predicts that transitioning to SAP SuccessFactors for human resource management and to SAP Concur for expense management will streamline employee journeys for key administrative processes, saving time and improving employee satisfaction.

The spokesperson remarks, “In the past when employees booked vacation leave, checked their remaining vacation days or claimed for expenses, they and their managers—particularly those based in different countries—often needed to work in several different systems, and/or needed to get support from administrative employees.”

The spokesperson continues, “With SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur, all employees will be able to use self-service capabilities online and via mobile devices to complete common user journeys themselves. Eventually, we plan to integrate SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur with SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, which will offer unprecedented insight into the performance of our people strategy.”

The spokesperson concludes, “Thanks to our work with IBM Services to deploy SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, we are building world-leading digital capabilities for less than a third of the total investment of our nearest competitor. As we continue our collaboration with IBM, we are in a strong position to build the lean, efficient operations we need to reach the very top of our industry.”

Part of a large, international group of companies, this agribusiness is focused on becoming a world leader in its industry.

To learn more about the IBM SAP Alliance, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: /cloud/sap/alliance .

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Case Studies - Agri enterprises

Cost effective shade net house, vermicomposting brings better yields and returns - a small farmer shows the way, daal mill improves nutritional security in mentapalli, a garden by children changing the face of the village, small is beautiful, an innovation that generates revenue for rural women.

Shri Jagnnath Gangaram Tayade A/P Ladsavangi, Taluq & District Aurangabada, Maharashtra (Mobile : 09421313616)

Age: 50 years Education: 10 std Landholding: 7.2 ha Farming experience: 27 Years Crops grown: Cotton, maize, sweet  orange seed  production of  capsicum, tomato  and water melon Livestock: Cow and buffaloes

Shade net house was developed by Shri. Jagnnath Tayade  from locally available iron material. Total height of the shade net  house is 6m from center place, Length is 36 m and width is 24 m.  The shade net house requires wire ropes. Here the obstacles within  shade net are negligible which helps for smooth intercultural  operations and easy movement of labour as compared to  recommended one.

This type of shade net house is suitable for growing heighted crops like capsicum, tomato, chili, etc. This shade net house sustains wind speed up to 80 km/hr and is economically viable as the total cost required to construct is Rs 60000 which become 30% less than the recommended technology and rain water is drained easily due to doom shape structure. At present 15 farmers had adopted this type of structure on 0.10 ha each and are taking seed production programme of capsicum and tomato

Source : AME Foundation

This is the case of a small farmer who chose to be different from the typical resource-  poor farmers struggling to make a living in the degraded drylands. His deep ‘love for life’ has not only earned him a decent living, but more importantly, it has inspired many other farmers to emulate him.

Chandranna, a young farmer, is known as ‘Nursery Chandranna’ before and ‘Vermicompost Chandranna’ now. He has earned Rs. 1.4 lakhs from the sale of vermicompost and earthworms in three years. It has now become a fairytale in the region where the average annual earnings for a small farmer like him does not exceed Rs. 15000.

An ideal village, an unfavourable setting, Chandranna lives in Tumkurlahalli, a village with 650 households in Molakalmuru Taluk of Chitradurga District of Karnataka. The village consists predominantly the backward communities – 410 SC families, 100 muslims and 100 lingayat families with a population of 3800. The village has about 3322 ha. of which 15% is dryland and 3.5% is under bore well irrigation. The remaining 2695 ha. (81.5%) is common land that includes wasteland, common grazing land and the ‘reserve forest’ where only shrubs and bushes are seen, occasionally. The terrain, in general, has shallow red sandy soils. With boulders scattered all over, it is not an ideal village for remunerative farming. With less than 500 mm. average annual rainfall, the farmers are forced into a gamble with groundnut cultivation, the only cash crop grown year after year. Over 30 years of monocropping, with groundnut and groundnut alone, has resulted in the yield levels declining to a dismal 8 q./ha. Though agriculture is hardly a lucrative proposition, majority of the people still depend on agriculture and wage labour for their livelihoods. Naturally, the village witnesses migration of men folk for most part of the year.

Small farmer with big hopes

In a village where agriculture hardly throws up surprises, Chandranna’s case demonstrates that keen interest and self-belief can make agriculture a dependable enterprise. For, it is not a story of overnight success but one of a systematic effort to utilize opportunities offered to the farmers in the village from a variety of agencies.

Coming from a poor farming family, Chandranna has inherited 3 acres of dryland of which one acre is uncultivable wasteland. Wage labour, hence, was more important a source of livelihood for the family than agriculture in the two acre land. His parents wanted their only son to study. It was however not possible for him to go beyond the pre-university level, owing to poverty. He was forced to return and join his parents in farming. In the Karnataka Watershed Development (KAWAD) project, with AME Foundation as a resource agency, Chandranna joined a Self-Help Group (SHG).

In 2000, Chandranna participated in a training on nursery raising at BAIF Institute of Rural Development, Karnataka (BIRD K), in Tiptur. But, he was more curious to know about vermicomposting, a parallel training session being organised for another group of farmers at the same time. He would join the group whenever possible. He got excited about rearing earthworms and preparing vermicompost.

On his return from nursery training, his group was given an opportunity to raise a nursery of 15,000 seedlings. The task was entrusted to Chandranna. Chandranna raised nursery for three consecutive years starting from the year 2000. His nursery was rated the best in the watershed project in 2003 and Chandranna became popular as ‘Nursery Chandranna’.

A modest beginning and a spectacular surge His curiosity about vermicomposting continued. With the little knowledge that he had gained during the training, he tried multiplying local species of earthworms in coconut shells. However, they did not survive.

In 2003, Chandranna built four vermicompost pits of size 6x3x3 cu.ft. with the support of KAWAD project. He didn’t know how to use the pits, though. A staff of GUARD then brought 2 kg. of earthworms which costed Chandranna Rs. 300. With the 2 kg. earthworms, he produced 20 q. vermicompost which he applied to his 2 acres of ragi crop. Growing ragi itself was an experiment in Tumkarlahalli as no one had grown ragi in the village before. He got 14 q. from 2 acres.

In 2004, he applied 6 q. of good quality vermicompost and 2 tractor loads of FYM (2 tons) along with a bag of DAP to 2 acres. This time he cultivated groundnut and obtained an yield of 20 bags weighing 9 q. of groundnuts.

Visiting tree-based farming systems, interacting with farmers who had been successful in composting and vermicomposting helped Chandranna in getting a broader idea about sustainable agriculture. He learnt more about vermicomposting with his visit to another progressive farmer in nearby village, B G Kere.

In the year 2005, Chandranna applied 6 q. vermicompost to one acre PTD plot along with sets of combination of practices like summer ploughing, seed treatment with bio agents (Rhizobium and Trichoderma), application of Gypsum (50 kg.), using a higher than normal seed rate (45 kg.), growing intercrops and border crops. The yield went up to 13 bags from one acre giving him 6.5 q. groundnuts. It was the highest yield recorded by a farmer from one acre in the last four years of AMEF’s work in the region. What was remarkable was the weight of each bag, which ranged between 50 and 60 kg. While Chandranna’s 25 bags weighed 13 q., his neighbour Tippeswamy’s 40 bags, weighed only 13 q. The trader buying the produce could not believe this. Infact the traders forced Chandranna to pour the contents out of the bag to make sure the bag did not contain stones. It was unusual that a bag of groundnut pods weighed more than 50 kgs. The uniform pod maturity and proper filling had improved the quality of groundnuts significantly.

Vermicomposting, a lucrative enterprise

Chandranna did not stop at producing vermicompost and applying it to his two acre land. He started selling both the earthworms and the vermicompost from 2004. In 2004, Chandranna sold 124 kg. earthworms at Rs. 150 per kg. earning Rs. 18,600. He earned another Rs. 7500 by selling 15 q. vermicompost at Rs. 500/q. On the whole, he earned around Rs. 26,100.

Inspired by an income higher than the one from groundnut, he intensified production and sale of worms and compost in 2005. In the process, he learned some lessons the hard way. He once packed 30 kg. of earthworms in soil culture for selling, which died before the deal was over. Later, he started selling worms packed in cow dung. When the watershed project, in its concluding year, offered more vermicompost pits to large number of farmers, the demand for earthworms further increased. He could earn Rs. 41,700 from sale of 278 kg. worms (at Rs. 150/kg.) and Rs. 11,500 from the sale of 23 q. compost at Rs. 500/q. That brought him a total of Rs. 53,200 in 2005. He further increased the number of vermicomposting pits. He started looking out for more crop residues and agricultural wastes. The four pongemia trees in his field, the biomass from the trees along the canal and the dry eucalyptus leaves provided raw material for his vermicompost pits. Realising the need for cowdung for vermicomposting, Chandranna started maintaining a pair of bullocks, a cow and 20 hens. The returns are on the rise, consistently. In the year 2006, in an year that witnessed unprecedented drought-like situation that was not seen in the last 50 years, Chandranna still managed to earn Rs. 58,750 by way of selling 285 kg. worms and 32 q. of vermicompost. His total earning since 2003 has been Rs. 1,38,050. The actual earnings could be much more. The Rs. 1.4 lakhs he earned is recorded in the account he has maintained by offering receipts. His ‘customers’ are mostly the SHGs and farmers coming from many NGOs in Bellary, Chitradurga, Bagalkot and Bijapur districts, who insist on bills. There are individual farmers buying compost or worms without asking for bills, in which case no records are available on the transactions. Now, he is offering a special price of Rs.100/kg. for SHGs, whereas others have to pay Rs.150. The nearby customers get an additional after-sales service from Chandranna. Chandranna visits his customers farms and if the survival of worms is not satisfactory, he provides some more worms, free of cost.

The beacon of hope for the hopeless

The popular name ‘Nursery Chandranna’ has now changed to ‘Vermicompost Chandranna’. A modest mud house is now getting extended with cement walls along with the increasing number of vermicomposting pits in the backyard. He has already inspired many farmers in his village to try out alternative farming practices in general and take up vermicomposting in particular. The self motivated farmers like Chandranna are just the kind of catalysts the NGOs look for in converting small successes into mass movements. It is just the right kind of urge many resource poor farmers need to overcome the limitations and defy the odds.

Mentapalli in Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh is like any other village of the semiarid India. It gets around 650 mm rainfall that is distributed erratically from mid June to September. The village is dominated by small and marginal farmers who cultivate their parched lands for a single season. During the dry periods, farmers migrate to far off places, in search of employment.

Pigeonpea is an important crop in this area, along with sorghum and maize. Bacterial wilt of pigeonpea is a serious soil-borne disease resulting in severe crop loss. With the interventions of the livelihoods program by ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), farmers are now able to reap some harvests by growing wilt-tolerant pigeonpea variety Asha. It tolerates wilt to a great extent and yields 20 to 30 per cent than the local variety.

The traditional practice after harvesting pigeonpea, was to split the produce by hand  operated grinding stones. This operation was generally done by men. Ever since the men started migrating from the village, this practice almost ceased to continue. On the contrary, this tiny village producing a lot of pigeonpea, started selling it in the market for a paltry Rs 12 –14 a kg and bought daal for a higher price at Rs 22 a kg., for domestic consumption.

The ICRISAT Watershed Team decided to break the typical ‘selling cheap and buying costly’ syndrome in Mentapalli and had discussions with the villagers. The villagers agreed to the proposal of processing the pigeonpea within the village to make enough daal, at least, for the domestic consumption. The Society for Development of Drought Prone Areas (SDDPA), an NGO implementing the program in Mentapalli watershed, motivated and mobilized the women’s self help group. Accordingly, a simple daal mill was installed in the village. Following installation, farmers were trained in handling the machine.

The SHG mobilised money to pay towards power consumption. It fixed the cost of milling a kilogram of daal. Thus, the villagers could get their pigeonpea milled at a reasonable cost besides getting grain husk as nutritive fodder.

However, the daal milled in the village could not fetch good price in the market, as it did not have the shine and the color. Therefore, the milled daal had to be used for domestic consumption only. As Asha was known for its better cooking quality and bold grains, it was the preferred option, particularly by the women.

Now the mill is working in full swing turning the Mentapalli pigeonpea in to daal (with almost 90% recovery) and bringing smiles on villagers’ faces. The women are happy as they are able to cook and taste what their family cultivates. They expressed that now they have access to increased nutrition at a lesser price, as daal is the cheapest source of protein.

Three factors have been responsible for the success of the daal-mill. Firstly, the operation of the mill was very simple and was similar to that of handling a typical floor mill, seen in any village. Secondly, the method of splitting pigeonpea was compatible to the villagers’ indigenous practice of soaking the pigeonpea overnight and sun-drying for 2-3 days before milling. Lastly, the simple daal mill operated on single-phase power supply, suitable for Mentapalli which has no three phase power supply.

The success of the daal-mill has spread to the neighbouring villages. People from other villages are getting their pigeonpea milled in Mentapalli.

Now the SHG in Mentapalli is planning to buy one Mill for the village, as the project installed daal mill is to be shifted to other villages of the project. Enthused by the outcome at Mentapalli, the idea is being successfully tried out in other places of Kurnool district, where pigeonpea is grown abundantly.

Sreenath Dixit, Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, Hyderabad, India

SP Wani and Ch Ravinder Reddy, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, India

Source : LEISA India , Vol 6-3

Baliaghati of West Medinipur is a tribal village inhabited by people belonging to very low income group with lack of basic facilities like health and nutrition. NPMS, a local organization has been fighting for long to change the scenario. Since 2006, DRCSC  started working with NPMS involving children in the age group of 12~15 on Ecology and Natural Resource related learning and experimentation activities.

Baliaghati is an area, where flood and drought, the two most destructive and atrocious forms of nature, are a common factor and the poorest of people living here have no option but to accept these vagaries of nature as part and parcel of their lives. Vegetables have never been a part of their staple diet. In June 2008 about 200 packets of vegetable seeds were distributed among 30 children. 18 of them could raise garden within their homestead.

Initiatives of others in the group were washed out by the flood waters. The packets contained the seeds of swamp cabbage, snake gourd, ridged gourd, bottle gourd, sweet potato, cowpea, yam bean, soybean, cucumber, bitter gourd, okra, Indian spinach, tarukala etc. They were reluctant to eat some of these vegetables as they had never seen them before. Later, NPMS took the initiative to cook and serve these less known vegetables in a bid to popularize them. Compost and vermicompost prepared by the children themselves were used for enriching the soil. On an average each of them received about 150 kg of vegetable within 3~4 months. The children kept a detailed record of the activities undertaken, changes observed, processes undergone, incidence and nature of pest attack, lifecycle of the plants, rate of germination and the quantity & quality of produce. These records gave the children an idea of the science behind it. Parents also showed considerable interest in the entire activity.

Apart from the eco-group children and their parents, now the other villagers are also getting an opportunity to eat these vegetables as the children have shared the surplus with them as a part of their awareness campaign so that all villagers could know the benefits of raising a garden in their backyards.

The activity was supported by Indienhilfe.

Source : DRCSC news, , Issue No. 3

Rakhi Turi, a housewife of a slum in Bolpur town is also the member of Bholapukur 1 small saving and credit group. Her husband Bikash Turi is a rickshaw puller. His monthly earning is Rs. 1650 which is not at all enough for their 5 headed family. This Schedule caste family is also listed in BPL list of the Government. Rakhi was in search of work, but could not find any. At that time DRCSC intervened there with the vermicompost making venture supported by Innovative Challenge Fund, KUSP. Rakhi Turi and her group showed their interest to this venture.

The project aimed to form 5 groups with 15 women members in each group. These groups would be collecting the vegetables wastes from the bolpur markets and make vermicompost commercially. The women of Bholapukur 1 group decided to construct pits to make vermicompost on the land of an organization in Jamuboni called 'Support'. The women members got training on how to make vermicompost. The males of the families also extended their help to collect vegetable wastes from markets. The women started collecting straws, cow dung etc. They started to make vermicompost with the high quality vermis. They all decided the name for their product also 'Basundhara Vermi Compost'. The total production for the first month was 400 kg from 2 vats. Now the time was to take initiative for selling their product. It was decided that the market price will be Rs. 10 per kg. After sale Rs. 1000 will be saved in the bank account to make pits in future. The rest will be distributed equally among the members.

Rakhi Turi could spend 1-2 hrs a day after her regular household work. She earned Rs. 200 in the first month. Her husband also had some extra earning by renting his rickshaw for collecting raw materials and campaigning for this project. Rakhi Turi was very happy as she was able to earn some extra income by spending her extra time and acclaimed that the business will made much larger by them in future.

Source : DRCSC newsletter, , Issue 6

Mr. K. Vivekanandan of Coimbatore ( Tamil Nadu ) invested Rs.8 lakh and created a 3 HP pin pulverizer for grinding chilli and coriander. "The machine is an ideal revenue generator for rural women who are interested in increasing their domestic income,” says Mr. Vivekanandan.

Most of the existing machines to grind chilli and coriander require high installation costs, and use a lot of power making it unsuitable for rural areas, where power supply may also be undependable.

Challenges faced

Mr. Vivekanandan thought he solved 90 per cent of the grinding problem when he developed the machine, and manufactured nearly 100 of them. But to his dismay he found that only 20 pieces found buyers. Some of the buyers returned the machine, because the chilli and coriander did not pass through the filter screen, and created too much dust while grinding.

Work came to a standstill, and did not resume for almost a year.

Mr. Vivekanandan came to know about Villgro (an organization that supports rural entrepreneurs) and he approached them for guidance. The staff at Villgro tapped different resources to work on this problem. Technical expertise first assisted Mr. Vivekanandan in producing a 1 HP, single phase machine, because the machine could not initially run at a speed on 3 HP. (In rural areas the preference is for a one- HP, single-phase machine due to voltage fluctuation).

After several trials they identified the problem of chilli and coriander getting stuck on the screen was not because of their high fibre content, but due to the speed of the rotor. Accordingly, the weight of the machine was reduced, its wall thickness, size, and diameter of the stator and rotor altered to suit rural application.

Mr. Vivekanandan brought down the cost of the machine to cater to rural needs by focusing on the types and amount of materials used. Each unit is priced at Rs. 11,500 (with motor).

For more information readers can contact:

Mr. K. Vivekanandan, M/s Vivega Engineering Works, New No: 116-118, Sathy Road, R. K. Puram, Ganapathy, Coimbatore - 641 006. Mobile No: 94437-21341.

Source : A innovation that generates revenue for women, Science & Technology column, The Hindu

Last Modified : 3/1/2020

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Home › Insights › Case Studies › Case Study: From Pain Points to Progress – Union Pension Fund Optimizes Operations

Case Study: From Pain Points to Progress – Union Pension Fund Optimizes Operations

Operational process mapping and optimization opportunities for improvement.

Download a PDF of this case study .

Executive Summary

A client in the union pension fund space offers various services including healthcare benefits, retirement and pension plans, disability and life insurance and advocacy support. The company faced challenges with its business systems – expressing a need for comprehensive and holistic general organizational process improvements. Withum was brought in to assist in identifying and optimizing improvement opportunities to reach future state goals through prioritized initiatives effectively.

Withum undertook a comprehensive operational diagnostic to pinpoint the root causes of the client’s business process pain points. This allowed Withum’s business and management consulting teams to offer change management solutions and optimize an efficient roadmap of prioritized initiatives. Withum’s thorough assessment of the client’s business processes aimed to standardize and define operations so the client could be confident in their business systems. Consulting engagement efforts culminated in opportunities for improvement deliverables with a central focus on prioritized initiatives and key actions that would deliver the most value to the client.

The Challenge

The company recognized the need for a comprehensive overhaul of its business processes, primarily due to challenges identified by Withum. These included:

• A manual workload and underutilization of system functionality
• Data unreliability and lack of insights visibility
• A reactive approach to work
• Challenges with cross-departmental communication
• Risk management
• Siloed systems

These hurdles presented a significant operational transformation and improvement opportunity, which were further uncovered in a comprehensive operational assessment.

The Withum team identified several challenges that required a comprehensive approach to address. The challenges were not just related to the systems themselves but were indicative of broader issues in the operational model. The project aimed to align technology investments with strategic growth goals, which involved prioritizing initiatives amidst competing projects and goals.

With a complex systems architecture and high investment in more technology solutions, the client was becoming more inundated with half-complete workflows and complex workarounds that grew as the technology environment became more complicated.

This was rooted in the organization’s ability to prioritize initiatives. The company often took a “big bang” approach to solving issues by layering more technology, time and initiatives to patch problems far and wide. Withum helped facilitate prioritization with the business to help them plan to allocate their resources effectively, allowing them to roll out phased changes.

The client suffered from execution challenges that significantly impacted the roll-out of organizational changes. They were in fire-fighting mode so much in the day-to-day that they were not tactically equipped to support the execution of strategies.

The client team recognized that addressing system challenges alone was insufficient and that an operational transformation required elevating people, optimizing processes and implementing data controls alongside technology changes. This holistic approach was necessary to maximize the organization’s yield and ensure investments were made in the right areas. Elevating people would include addressing low-hanging fruit, elevating roles and responsibilities to be more value-added across the organization and having leaders be able to operate above the weeds.

In terms of low-hanging fruit, the client had multiple systems and sources of truth that they struggled to tie together. Instead of building an entirely new architecture up front, the optimal choice was to fix what we have today through training and minor process improvements. This would result in quick wins for the client team, increasing morale and client buy-in which is imperative for the project going forward. Given the heavy resistance to change in this organization, it’s important to note that quick wins are not a replacement for long-term solutions – they help to build momentum for longer-term initiatives.

These challenges highlight the complexity of the system modernization project, the need for a strategic, disciplined, accountable approach to drive value through the new system and the evolution of people’s roles and responsibilities in the organization. The project’s success depended on the collaborative efforts of the team to address these challenges effectively.

The Approach and Solution

The engagement with this client consisted of a comprehensive operational diagnostic and concluded with an opportunity for improvement. Withum undertook a current-state strategic, tactical and operational process mapping review and an initiatives prioritization workshop to determine the ideal sequence of events for introducing organizational change. To support workshop initiatives, the Withum team also utilized surveys to perform general sentiment analysis and uncover pain points that may not have been freely shared in a workshop environment.

The operational assessment revealed critical themes and challenges that, once addressed, will significantly benefit the organization. These insights emerged from evaluating the company’s organizational structure, technological footprint, operational pain points and inefficiencies. With this knowledge, we aligned the company’s strategic vision with a streamlined process.

Withum discovered that the client suffered from people, process, technology and data themes that offered significant organizational improvement opportunities. To combat these issues, the Withum team created comprehensive opportunities for improvement along with a detailed roadmap for company success. The roadmap was phased first to stabilize, optimize and grow the operations’ efficiency and effectiveness. Change management was factored in to change the organization’s approach from a “big bang” model to one focused on quick wins and holistic solutions.

Additionally, a change management user adoption approach was vital to gaining more ownership and active participation, contributing to the growth path potential for functions and the organization. A hybrid waterfall and agile approach was adopted to address immediate challenges while laying the strategic groundwork for future changes.

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A case study in sin: The rise and fall of Sihanoukville

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Few establishments could be more depressing than a Sihanoukville casino. Stony faces. Empty rooms. Pleading eyes from hostesses and table dealers desperate to hit their quotas.

Not too long ago, I wondered why Chinese whales (high-rolling punters) would fly all the way to Australia to gamble when cities like this, on the southern beaches of Cambodia, were so close to home and designed especially for them.

The brightest part of Sihanoukville at night. Credit: Zach Hope

Having visited a few casinos in Sihanoukville, it is now a little clearer. The venues we chose, at least, are not places of revelry. They are bright and shiny, stale and despairing. As quiet as libraries.

It is difficult to keep tabs on casino numbers here because they are regularly closing and opening – or operating illegally – but it may be around 80 now. The gamblers we see inside are often alone, fixated on the table, looking up occasionally to register the peculiar sight of a Westerner wandering around awkwardly.

When it was a place of sleepy beaches and backpackers, Westerners loved Sihanoukville. Not so much these days. Tour company Intrepid Travel cut the city from its itinerary in 2020 because it had been “swamped by foreign investment and tourism, mauled by construction”.

Most buildings are Chinese owned. All have Chinese signage. While there are many Cambodian faces, it is difficult to find sit-down restaurants specialising in Khmer food. High rents nudge up the prices of meals, squeezing out the locals, and the Chinese gamblers prefer their own fare.

We arrive on a Saturday and see hundreds of Cambodian weekend-trippers from Phnom Penh eating packed lunches on the beach.

Sihanoukville’s transformation by Chinese money and gambling has been well documented . But the heady days of 24/7 construction and rivers of gold are done. Hundreds of abandoned, grimy construction sites pock the city like giant tombstones. The casinos we visit are next to empty. One room had more than a dozen staff and not a single gambler. It was a Saturday night.

The Cambodian government’s Sihanoukville narrative is about post-pandemic recovery. It has launched tax incentives to revive the dead buildings and is working with the Chinese on a masterplan.

Land has also been cleared for a $US16 billion ($23.4 million) satellite city called Bay of Lights, which is being developed by the conglomerate of Chinese-born tycoon Chen Zhi, now a naturalised Cambodian.

Nearby, the Ream Naval Base is being upgraded with more Chinese money. This has sent the US and its allies into a dither about whether the People’s Liberation Army Navy is going to use it as its own – a Chinese outpost in one of the most hotly contested regions in the world. The Cambodian government, not particularly trusted in the West, says this is nonsense.

Chinese ships at Ream Naval Base, as seen from a boat off Sihanoukville. Credit: Zach Hope

Since December, China has had two corvette warships – soon to be handed over to Cambodia – parked there. You don’t need satellite images to know this. See them on the road out from Sihanoukville or from a hired boat ($US60) – even better, while eating breakfast in a hammock at one of the restaurants next door to the base. They are no secret.

Australia knows well that where cash and casinos go, so go the crooks. Sihanoukville, though, insulated by corruption or indifference from Cambodian officials, has for the best part of a decade been a special case study in sin.

We met a Cambodian victim of human traffickers who lured him to the city with the promise of legitimate work and accommodation.

The Vietnamese-speaking man, who asked not to be identified, was to lead a team of Vietnamese workers at an online casino. As it turned out, he says, the building was one of Sihanoukville’s notorious scam compounds, and the games were rigged.

Wealthy Vietnamese men would win good money at first and form online relationships with the captives. Then, the gamblers would lose the lot.

After a few days, our victim tried to leave but was blocked. “They said I had to stay for six months. I said no. Then I started to cry out to the Vietnamese. I said, ‘We are sold! We are cheated!’”

He started a fight and was thrown into a makeshift cell, throwing punches at whomever tried to come inside and zap him with a cattle prod. In the violence, the goons forgot to take his phone, so he called a friend, who called the police.

This man was enslaved in a Sihanoukville scam compound. Credit: Zach Hope

The man was freed when the attending officers discovered he was a Cambodian citizen. “They didn’t care about the Vietnamese,” he says. “Even when I told them there were 30 or 40 people in my room, they didn’t care.”

That was in 2019. He never found out what happened to the others.

Cambodia has since formally banned online gambling and raided some scam compounds. A “fake crackdown”, a Cambodia-based activist told me. But something is happening here.

While the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the city, every trader we speak to says business is down on last year. One Chinese businessman, there for the gambling, talks of “too many regulations” but does not elaborate.

One of hundreds of abandoned construction sites in Sihanoukville. Credit: Zach Hope

A restaurant worker says her old place used to have a contract delivering meals to a building full of “online” workers. The client was most likely operating an illegal online casino, scam compound, or both. In any case, the contract ended because the client moved operations to the Thai border.

We hear this more than once. Media attention has made it harder to run illegal operations. At the borders, criminals can flit to the other side if things get hot.

As one sin city wanes, others grow.

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Lake County News-Sun Sports | Call it a Case study in perseverance. Grayslake…

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Lake county news-sun sports | call it a case study in perseverance. grayslake north’s kyle case makes an impressive debut after bike crash..

A bicycle crash ended Case’s sophomore season before it started, and it wasn’t until last month that he finally played left tackle for the Knights.

“I was a little nervous in the beginning after missing the whole year,” Case said. “When I came back, everyone was so welcoming and treated me like I didn’t miss a single day. It feels good to be out there with a team that wants to win.”

Case’s presence on the field has made that endeavor easier for Grayslake North (3-1, 1-1), which plays crosstown rival Grayslake Central (3-1, 2-0) in a Northern Lake County Conference game on Friday. Despite Case’s long absence and the fact that his only previous season of organized football came on the freshman team in 2022, the 6-foot-3, 250-pound junior has made himself right at home in the offensive line’s most high-stakes position.

It’s often deemed as such because the left tackle’s responsibility in the passing game is protecting a right-handed quarterback’s blind side, and Case has rolled through his first four varsity games without allowing a sack of senior Mitchell Hughes .

“I love run blocking because it’s fun to just be able to hit the other guy,” Case said. “But I think I’m better at pass pro. I probably practice it more, and I’ve spent a lot of time working on footwork.”

The fact that Case can handle both types of blocking shows his impressive progress since the injury, which occurred in July 2023 on a bike ride with a couple of friends. To this day, Case said he still has no idea what he ran over to make him fly over the top of his bike and land squarely onto his right elbow. He recalled that he wasn’t bleeding but knew there was something wrong because his elbow was numb.

“It obviously could have been much worse,” Case said. “But it was really demoralizing because I had been working really hard, looking forward to being at my best when the season started.”

Instead, Case had surgery the day after the crash to repair his right triceps muscle, and his recovery lasted about six months. He said he lost a significant amount of weight, and his conditioning suffered.

“I started off easy and worked my way back up, but I couldn’t do a lot with my arm,” Case said. “I knew I was behind, so I had to work twice as hard as everyone else and then some.”

Case was able to play baseball on Grayslake North’s junior varsity team in the spring. He didn’t play in the field very often, however, because his mobility was limited and his elbow still hurt. But he eventually turned a corner and was a full participant for football workouts this summer.

“No doubt, there were still a lot of unknowns even into this summer about him getting re-assimilated,” Grayslake North coach Brian Johnson said. “But he’s holding his own really well, to the point where he’s usually on his own when we throw the ball.”

That means players who may otherwise be asked to chip an oncoming rusher are free to flow into pass routes. It also means Case has earned teammates’ and coaches’ trust in short order. Among the most prominent in that group are his fellow line mates, all four of whom are seniors and returning starters. In particular, Case has developed a bond with his neighbor to the right, left guard Caiden O’Brien.

“Us seniors didn’t know what to expect from him, but he’s adapted pretty quickly,” O’Brien said. “We’ve developed a good connection — like in run blocking, knowing when one of us should get off the linebacker and stay on the defensive end. We have faith in him all the way to the whistle.”

Case’s belief in himself is growing as well. The long scar stretching from the bottom of his elbow to the top of his triceps reminds him how far he has come.

“I look at it a lot, and it reminds me of how bad the injury was,” Case said. “I’m not playing perfectly, but for missing a whole year, I think I’ve been solid. I’m actually really proud of myself.”

Steve Reaven is a freelance reporter.

More in Lake County News-Sun Sports

Lake County News-Sun Sports | Carmel’s Molly Malzahn comes full circle. Her career hasn’t been a straight line. ‘It made me a stronger person.’

Lake County News-Sun Sports | Steve Reaven’s football rankings and players of the week for Lake County

Daily Southtown Sports | Football and local scores for the Southland, Aurora, Elgin, Naperville and Lake County

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