Customer success story
 - Analysis, Development and Maintenance

  

Our Customer:
m&p: public relations

m&p: public relations brings topics into communication - online, offline, live. Topics with relevance. Topics that will still count tomorrow, e.g. healthy nutrition and exercise, organic farming and the food industry, rural areas and urban greenery, the environment and nature.

  • More than 25 years of experience in the communication of relevant topics
  • Work for clients with outstanding ecological, economic and social responsibility
  • Over 100 projects carried out, focusing on trade fair appearances, network management, press and media relations, school competitions.

Starting Point

Within the framework of the Federal Program for Organic Farming and Other Forms of Sustainable Agriculture (German: Bundesprogramm Ökologischer Landbau und andere Formen nachhaltiger Landwirtschaft (BÖLN)), events organized by organic farms are funded by the Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food (BLE). m&p organizes and coordinates, among other things, the registration, logging and funding submission of these events. Until now, each event had to be registered on paper forms, documented after execution and finally submitted for funding. This paper process involved a great deal of work both for the organic farms and for m&p as the coordination office. To check and track the events, m&p previously used an application in which the submitted events had to be entered and maintained manually.

There was a desire to simplify and at the same time improve this process for all parties involved as part of the continuation of the program.

The Project

Services

Analysis, development, maintenance

Methods

Agile development

Technologies

JHipster, Spring Boot, Spring Security, Gradle, React, Redux, Thymeleaf, Bootstrap, Flying Saucer, Webpack, Java, TypeScript, Sass, PostgreSQL, Docker, Jenkins

cronn reference quote mandp

The goals of simplifying and improving the entry and application for the farmers in the 290 organic farms network have been fully achieved, the feedback from the farms is positive without exception. In addition, we as the coordination office and the BLE as the customer can view and control the project status events at any time and from anywhere. Really well done. And in addition, the cooperation with the cronn developers is uncomplicated and super nice; they listen intently, analyze to the point and always talk to us IT laymen in a way we can understand. That's a lot of fun.

— Richard Marxen, Managing Partner m&p: public relations GmbH

Solution

The goal was to implement a web application that includes all relevant user groups - organic farms, coordination office and Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food (German: Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung) - and covers the entire life cycle of the events. The life cycle of an event ranges from registration by a farm and verification by the coordination office, through logging and subsequent verification of the log, to the creation of a funding statement. Each user group also has individual, task-centered views and functionalities in the web application. In addition, an automatic publication of audited events takes place as an RSS feed on the information platform www.oekolandbau.de to draw the attention of potential visitors to the events.

cronn analyzed m&p's requirements and ideas in order to achieve an optimal solution for all parties involved. Development took place in two-week iterations, with a tested, executable application presented at the end of each iteration which also could be tested by m&p itself. In this way, we were able to regularly ensure together that exactly the right solution was developed. By using JHipster, a testable, functioning application with user administration and a first part of the functional scope was already available after the first two weeks.

It was also important to enable barrier-free participation in the program for all people. Therefore, the BITV criteria were taken into account in the development of the web application. In particular, m&p as a coordination office has the ability to perform all functionalities in the web application by proxy for an organic farm, so that in case of difficulties a phone call or an email is enough to get direct support.

Successful Digitization

Organic farms can now conveniently register new events in a web portal, also using a past event as a template. Furthermore, they can easily keep track of which events have already been logged and accounted for through a dashboard. This means that farms do not need to keep separate documentation for the year(s) (events can also be billed in the following year). The creation of the funding statement is also much more convenient, as all necessary data is automatically filled in from the stored master data of an organic farm and an event. The created PDF only needs to be signed.

For m&p as a coordination office, a lot of manual work is eliminated, which in turn gives additional freedom, for example, to support the farms through press work in their events if necessary. Through numerous filter options, m&p can still maintain a good overview of the organic farms participating in the program and the events posted. If required, such overviews can also be exported directly as Excel files. Furthermore, m&p has full control over the user administration, i.e. they can independently create or delete user accounts.

The web application also offers new opportunities for the Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food, as they can specifically check funding statements by accessing all events. Furthermore, an overview in the dashboard directly shows how much funding could still be accessed in the future.

cronn Pluspoint

Rapid realization

Less than half a year from initial project meeting to launch

Digitization

Improvements for all involved and elimination of a lot of paperwork

Long term support

Even after introduction, still minor changes for optimal user experience

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cronn reference quote mandp

The collaboration with cronn was a great enrichment! Due to the regular exchange and the constant thinking of the entire cronn project team, an uncomplicated and particularly effective cooperation at eye level has resulted, from which an excellent result has emerged.

— Laura Wittemann, m&p: public relations, Project Manager of the Coordination Office for Demonstration Farms Organic Farming