Going Digital Was Not the Problem: Rebuilding Fertiliser Quoting

We recently worked with one of the leading fertiliser distributors in South Africa, a business that supplies a supply around 15% of the domestic Fertiliser market. Part of their success has been an emphasis on customising fertiliser blends to each farmer’s soil. However, selling custom fertiliser blends poses a unique challenge to the sales process. Each sales representative must have a method of determining the amount of fertiliser and the price thereof. Not to mention the sales representative also needs a way to arrange transportation and calculate the transport cost of the fertiliser with the customer.

The team has been using Excel to do these complex calculations. The Excel template was very well thought out, allowing sales representatives to input complex mixes and variations of nutrients into it. The standard representation for fertiliser nutrients is the N-P-K notation, where:

N = Nitrogen = N

P = Phosphorus = P₂O₅

K = Potassium = K₂O

This is why you might see something like NPK 15:7:14 on a fertiliser bag (because apparently your wife's sunflower needs a nutritional programme). The numbers might seem like total gibberish, but each of those values are used to meticulously calculate the price of one product, signed off by an agronomist. The sheet even allowed packaging and some rudimentary transport options and thus creating a full quote for a customer from one Excel file!

Whilst it may seem like the problem of pricing and blend calculation has been solved, some elements of the Excel sheet leave much to be desired. Each quote was a separate copy of the file, so across thousands of customers it was difficult to see what had been quoted, by who, or on which version of the price list. When prices changed, a new file went out to the whole sales force, and correctness depended on every representative using the latest copy. Because quotes lived as attachments, checking what a customer had been offered the previous season meant searching mailboxes. Each quote also had to be sent to the admin to be reviewed, often leading to multiple files having to be downloaded to get the quote “just right”.

The replacement built was a flutter web application, which covers the path from the start of quoting right through to approval in one centralised system. The application is set up with each and every customer built in. No more copying and pasting the old Excel files anymore. The representative can then fill in the target nutrient recommendations. The price list is centralised, so the representative doesn’t even have to worry about if it’s the correct version of the quote.

Implementing the transport calculation took a bit longer than the nutrient pricing mathematics. Fertiliser reaches a farm by several different arrangements, each with its own cost and production consequences. Listing the options was easy; presenting them so a representative could work through them quickly, without training, took several attempts and taught us valuable lessons about UI and UX.

Adopting to a new process or system took time to implement and can be daunting. The sales representatives spend their days on farms, and the spreadsheet had never visibly failed them. What helped was removing steps they used to do themselves: no file to download, no price list to check, no attachment to send, no untracked wait for a reply. We minimized the steps they needed to take to make a valid quote, as well as gave them a centralized platform for admin and rep alike. This is the value of custom software: not the digitizing necessarily, but the time you save by doing your daily tasks.

The platform is now in production, replacing the old Excel sheet and streamlining the quote–to–approval process in one system. What previously required a sales representative to manage complex blend calculations, keep track of price lists, prepare files, send attachments and wait for administrative approval can now be handled within a single workflow, while still retaining the flexibility that made the original Excel template so valuable to the sales team. For a business supplying roughly thousands of tons of fertiliser across South Africa, even small improvements to the way a quote is prepared, checked and approved can have a meaningful impact when repeated across thousands of customers and countless individual blends. In our client’s case, that means getting a carefully calculated blend from a sales representative's screen to a customer's farm with considerably less friction, and, of course, keeping your wife's sunflowers happy in the process.