When most people think of Bayer, they think aspirin and other pharmaceuticals. Yet the company’s leadership in the realm of agricultural sciences has expanded heavily in recent years, most notably due to its 2016 acquisition of Monsanto. Now, Bayer has become the world’s leading agricultural company.
Its growth isn’t solely from acquisitions, of course. Bayer is investing heavily in research and development, attempting to improve seed and crop production in support of digital farming. Data is imperative both in integrating new acquisitions and with R&D, because it can help validate decision making in terms of where to invest. Yet between Bayer’s legacy systems and the newly added Monsanto data, it became difficult to derive where the true value lies. Scaling up its data analytics strategy became a business imperative.
Bayer’s growth trajectory required a stronger emphasis on data analysis and a robust self-service analytics platform that could be used company-wide. The solution would drive decision making via visual analytics and help to build a more collaborative relationship between employees and company data. Data virtualization was also vital to Bayer, because it allowed different users to explore the data freely, depending on the functionality and decision making required.
Bayer is able to accommodate nearly 15,000 users as they tap into the crop sciences data needed to help the company stay at the forefront of the industry. Collaboration is easier than ever, as data silos have been removed and standalone applications have been integrated. Because the self-service platform is used for so many different functions, Bayer implemented a set of guidelines known as the “FAIR Principles”—findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable—to ensure proper and efficient use of the data. In doing so, the company sowed the seeds for a culture of collaboration and mutual respect for each other and for the data.
To learn more about how Bayer’s crop sciences division is utilizing TIBCO’s self-service data analytics solutions to maintain its stronghold in the agroscience market, check out the full case study here.