Case study / Agritech
A phone app that works without internet, used by field agents across 128 plots and 3,400 farmers. It records a delivery in under a minute.
Field agents were writing deliveries on paper because the old app failed without internet. We built a phone app that works offline and saves when a signal appears. It now tracks 3,400 farmers and 128 plots.
Field agents recorded deliveries on paper and handed the sheets in at the end of the week. By the time the office typed them up, the numbers were already wrong. Farmers had no reliable view of the day's price, and the yield forecast was a guess dressed as a plan.
The team had tried a form app before. It broke the first time an agent lost signal, so the agents went back to paper. Any new system had to work with no connection at all.
We spent three weeks in the field, including two market days. The app was designed around one rule: an agent should be able to log a delivery with one hand, in under a minute, and never see a spinner. Everything else was built around that.
Recording a delivery dropped below one minute per record. The office stopped retyping paper sheets, and the forecast stopped being a guess. Four months after launch, 128 of the 132 active plots were still using the app, which is the number that matters.
“The field team can log a delivery in under a minute, even with one bar of signal. That detail is why the app is still in use.”
The next phase adds a lightweight simple agent ranking and a SMS summary for farmers. Both are small, both are optional, and neither is allowed to slow down the one minute delivery log.
Your version
If your team works away from a desk, the software has to assume the network will drop.
