AgSights is a not-for-profit member co-operative that believes that easy data capture and data-driven insights are imperative to increasing the profitability and sustainability of agricultural operations.

The software solutions we offer include: biotrackPlus, a herd/flock management application for livestock (beef cattle, sheep, goat and bison) producers; bioLinks, an inventory-sales tracking solution designed for agricultural businesses; and ProcessorLinks a collaboration to increase the efficiency of booking harvest space for livestock.

In this project, we are looking for learners to put data analytics skills into practice to build tools that will empower livestock operations across North America to make data-driven decisions to improve the productivity, profitability and sustainability of their operations.

Our bioTrack Plus herd management software is built on the Microsoft Dynamics platform, which has robust data analytics and visualization capacity. This version of the software was launched in late 2022 and has users with beef, sheep, goat and bison operations across North America. We continue to enhance the platform to provide more value to members. One key area of continued growth, is building reports and visualizations because a herd management software is only as valuable as the insights it can provide users.

In this project, learners will have the opportunity to develop summary reports and visualizations on the Microsoft Dynamics platform for a database of over 2 million animal records. This will provide valuable real-world experience building analytics tools on a commercially-available low-code platform that is used in many industries around the world. They will be working with livestock geneticists that have extensive experience in the manipulation and analysis of animal data as well as experience coding in SQL, R, Python, JS, C# and more.

This will involve several different steps for the learners, including:

1. Knowledge transfer activities to build awareness of the types of data collected in bioTrack Plus and the value it can provide to livestock operations.
2. Building knowledge of the low-code Microsoft Dynamics platform to facilitate completion of the other project tasks.
3. Reviewing and providing suggestions to improve existing reporting tools, using knowledge of best practices in data analytics and visualizations.
4. In-depth descriptive analysis of the existing SQL database of over 2 million animal records and hundreds of data points per animal to determine what data users are capturing and where we can provide more value. Since this is producer recorded data it is often messy and inconsistent, so data cleaning will be a critical first step before analysis can be performed.
5. Translate formulas to capture summary data for key metrics that are important to livestock producers from the old SQL-based system into the new Microsoft Dynamics platform.
6. Build reports and interactive dashboard visualizations in Microsoft Dynamics to provide bioTrack Plus uses more insight to inform their decisions. The reports of interest in this project provide summary-level information for groups of animals.

Access to all available data, databases and systems to complete the project, mentorship by data analysts and subject matter experts with extensive experience, written requirements to help define the scope of the project, opportunity to learn about the Microsoft Dynamics platform with support from a licensed Microsoft Partner available, overall supervision.