Bonsucro’s Digital Transformation to Drive Impact in Sustainable Agriculture 

To digitise their data management and enhance operational efficiency, Bonsucro, a global platform dedicated to accelerating the sustainable production and uses of sugar cane, partnered with ADC’s Agriculture & Food team. This collaboration aimed to create a strategic digitalisation roadmap that would align with Bonsucro’s vision and support their goal of expanding their capabilities and impact. The project was realised in two phases: developing the roadmap and executing a key part of it by setting up Bonsucro’s first cloud infrastructure. 

Bonsucro is tasked with leveraging certification and impact data from certified entities around the world, to deliver value to over 300 members. Consequently, they needed a comprehensive digitalisation plan to prioritise technological use cases that would streamline operations, improve member engagement, and promote the uptake of sustainable sugar cane. 

The key challenges they faced included:  

• Data Fragmentation: Storing and analysing data from separate sources, including Salesforce, excel sheets, and more, in different locations. 

• Data Quality: Ensuring data quality and referential integrity while integrating both community databases (e.g. Salesforce) and internal Excel-based sources was necessary. 

• Resource Constraints: Aligning the scope of the project with the available resources required careful planning and execution. 

The objective of Phase 1 was to develop a digitalisation roadmap for Bonsucro, aligned with their strategic objectives. As part of this roadmap, we designed a future-state data and IT architecture capable of supporting all upcoming roadmap initiatives. A key element of this architecture is the creation of a centralised platform to store data from various sources. This single source of truth ensures clean, quality-controlled data, allowing for the development of accurate reports, models, and dashboards. 

Approach: 

• IT and Data Architecture Scan: Conducted a comprehensive analysis to compare the current state with the desired state. 

• Stakeholder Engagement: Engaged extensively with stakeholders through interviews, surveys, and design sprints to gather insights and ensure alignment. 

• Strategy Setting: Supported Bonsucro in defining strategic priorities to guide the digitalisation efforts and ensure alignment with their long-term goals. 

• Governance Framework: Developed a governance framework to establish robust data governance practices and ensure sustainable management of data resources. 

• Domain Expertise: Leveraged our extensive agricultural knowledge to tailor solutions specific to Bonsucro’s needs and industry. 

• Knowledge Transfer: Worked closely with Bonsucro’s internal teams to ensure smooth adoption and knowledge transfer. 

The result was a digitalisation roadmap that prioritised practical use cases directly contributing to Bonsucro’s objectives. The roadmap received unanimous support from stakeholders, ensuring alignment and ownership. 

Following the roadmap development, our Agriculture & Food team assisted Bonsucro in setting up their first cloud infrastructure on Azure. This phase aimed to centralise Bonsucro’s data, integrate diverse data sources, and improve data quality. 

Although the integration of the community database with internal data sources presented challenges, particularly in ensuring data quality and referential integrity, ADC addressed these by thoroughly understanding Bonsucro’s business and history. Consequently, this method ensured accurate, future-proof data integration and availability.  

Overall, the successful execution of this phase means that Bonsucro’s most essential data is now better ingested, structured, and stored. This significantly improves their data management and availability to leverage their data to improve operational capabilities. 

The collaboration between ADC’s Agriculture & Food team and Bonsucro laid a strong foundation for the latter’s digital future. By developing and executing a strategic digitalisation roadmap, Bonsucro is now better positioned to achieve its mission of promoting sustainable sugar cane through enhanced data management and operational efficiency. This includes: 

• Operational Efficiency: Reduced manual work and automated quality control, enhancing the ease and efficiency of data analysis. 

• Enhanced Data Access: Data analysts can now build dashboards on a centralised repository without needing to clean and combine data from various sources. 

• Continuous Support: ADC continues to provide guidance for future improvements and collaborated closely to support increasing Bonsucro’s internal data literacy.  

Overall, this project is a great example of how targeted digital transformations can help organisations create impact in the agriculture and food sectors.  

If you are interested in learning more about our Agriculture & Food services, please contact Julia van Huizen, Agriculture & Food Lead.