Ag Energy Ship Notice and Other Working Group News

Portfolio Management Center

Ag Energy Ship Notice and Other Working Group News

By Dan Berne, AgGateway Portfolio Manager

Here’s a brief summary of Working Group activities this month, starting with the latest news.

New! Working Group 10 (WG10): Ag Energy Ship Notice

The agricultural energy segment has a need to improve the speed and efficiency of data exchange in the shipping and receiving of product between suppliers and distributors/retailers. This includes shipment data for refined fuels, LP, and grease and lube products. The Ag Energy Ship Notice Working Group will develop and deploy a digitally connected Shipment to Invoice process for ag, commercial and consumer fuels movement.

Through this work energy suppliers will gain integrated connections to their distributors and retailers. This will also reduce the burden of generating duplicative forms. Distributors will have improved visibility of product and location data. And importantly, they will eliminate the manual data entry that they currently must do. Retailers will see improved receiving and invoice matching, and eliminate their manual entry.

The working group began meeting February 25 and plans to finish in 14 weeks. The Chair is Randy Fry of Ceres Solutions. Those interested in participating should complete the “Join a Working Group” form or contact Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org.

In the Pipeline

We expect two more working groups to be chartered and ready to begin soon:

  • The Data Linking group is finalizing its charter. As noted last month, the intent is to link summary metadata about Critical Tracking Events (CTE), such that raw data can be found for analyses.
  • Another new working group will leverage the work done by the Ag Lab Data working group to focus on soil testing data in Latin America.

More on these upcoming working groups next month.

Other Key Activities

WG03 Product Catalog:

  • The working group continues to seek more companies to use the catalog API. If you are interested or want more information, contact the working group Chair Mike Altman or contact Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org.
  • The group is making some changes to OAGIS Catalog JSON Schema v1.0 that was submitted and approved by the Standards & Guidelines Committee. Version 1.1 is due out in March.
  • The group leadership has met to discuss next steps and the need for a follow-on working group. Look for more on this next month. Meanwhile, the group is in discussions with the European region on leveraging the work already done. This conversation is likely to lead to broader discussions and opportunities. Stay tuned!

WG04 Agricultural Laboratory Data:

The group has been meeting with the AgriSemantics working group to apply the observations and measurements model to MODUS to provide a lexicon of semantics, including nomenclature and geopolitical aspects.

WG05 Mix Ticket:

The group will next meet in April to determine next steps. If you are interested, please contact Adam Hilton or Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org.

WG06: Farm Inputs - Reference Data:

The working group will be meeting with members of the ADAPT team on the reference data model and RDF use cases. A full report on their work-to-date will be published later this month. Their next steps are to specify a global set of APIs to exchange data for crop protection products, based on the Lex-Agri data model.

WG07: Farm Inputs - Work Order and Work Record:

The working group is standardizing their cloud application to exchange data using the ADAPT model. As this is likely to require some modifications and plugin extensions, they will be reviewing this with the ADAPT team.

WG08: In-Field Product ID Plugin:

This new working group (announced in last month’s issue) will fund and manage the development of an ADAPT plugin that enables the traceability of products shipped from a retailer and used during field operations. The initial use case is related to planting of seed with a pilot during spring planting 2021. The group anticipates that capabilities for crop protection can be added soon afterwards. The group is up and running, and making rapid progress. A “how to” video will also be added if the group can secure the funding. Members may contribute time and domain expertise, funds to support the contracted development of the plugin, or both. For more information, contact the working group Chair Scott Nieman or Member Services at Member.Services@AgGateway.org.