From paper slips to a connected crop supply chain

The client is a regional agribusiness group that sources crops from smallholder growers across South Asia. Procurement runs through village-level aggregators. Field officers visit farms during the season, agree on quantities, and collection centers take delivery at harvest. For years the whole chain ran on paper: intake slips at the collection center, notebooks for input advances, and phone calls to move trucks.

The paper system held while the network was small enough for managers to know every aggregator personally. It stopped holding as sourcing expanded into new districts. Head office could not see what had been bought until slips physically arrived, often long after intake. Grading was subjective and contested, so growers disputed deductions they could not verify. Payments lagged because every slip had to be matched by hand to a grower, an advance ledger and a truckload before finance would release funds. Growers who waited too long sold their next harvest to whoever paid cash at the farm gate.

Kentro was engaged to replace the paper chain with a platform drawn from its agritech product line: field data capture on mobile devices that work without connectivity, digital crop intake and quality grading, farmer payments driven by verified records, inventory and dispatch management, and advisory content delivered to growers through the same channel.

The hard problems were environmental and operational. Collection points sit in weak-coverage areas, field staff carry entry-level handsets, and every record captured in the field eventually becomes a payment to a farmer, so accuracy could not be optional.

• No connectivity where the work happens: Farms and collection centers sit in areas with patchy or absent mobile coverage. Any system that required a live connection at the moment of intake would have failed in the field.
• Contested grading and unexplained shrinkage: Quality assessment was subjective and undocumented, and weights recorded in the field rarely matched what arrived at the warehouse. Nobody could prove where the difference came from.
• Slow, opaque payments to growers: Finance would not release funds until paper slips were matched to grower ledgers and truckloads by hand. Growers waited without any visibility into what they were owed or why deductions were made.
• No live picture of stock: Head office learned what had been procured only when paper arrived, and buyer commitments were made against inventory nobody could confirm. Dispatch planning ran on phone calls.

Kentro delivered an offline-first Android application for field teams, web consoles for collection centers, warehouses and head office, and a cloud API layer that treats every field record as an event. Records are written to a local store first and synchronized through a queued operation log when a connection appears, so weak coverage never blocks an intake.

• Offline-first field capture: The field app stores grower registrations, geotagged farm plots, visit notes and intake records in an embedded SQLite database and syncs them when connectivity returns. Idempotent APIs and server-side deduplication mean a retried sync never creates a duplicate purchase.
• Structured intake and quality grading: Intake is recorded against registered grower profiles, with grading captured as structured parameters (moisture, foreign matter, damage) backed by photo evidence. Each lot receives a QR-coded identity that follows it from the collection center scale to warehouse receipt, so field and warehouse weights reconcile against the same record.
• Farmer payments driven by verified records: Procurement value is computed from graded intake, with input advances netted automatically from each grower's ledger. Payment instructions flow to bank transfer and mobile wallet rails under maker-checker approval, and the grower receives a payment advice by SMS.
• Inventory and dispatch on the same data spine: Warehouse receipts, lot-level stock positions, dispatch orders and gate passes are generated from the same intake records, and postings flow into the client's finance system through event-driven integration. Buyer commitments are tracked against stock that actually exists.
• Advisory content through the same channel: Agronomy advisories, crop calendars and seasonal alerts are managed in a content module and pushed to growers in local languages, sized for low-bandwidth delivery on entry-level Android devices.

The result is measured in what the client's teams stopped doing by hand, and in what became possible once every record was digital from the moment of capture.

• Procurement is visible as it happens: Head office sees intake as field records sync instead of waiting for slips to travel. Sourcing decisions during the season are made against current positions rather than last week's paperwork.
• Grading disputes settle against evidence: Every deduction traces to recorded parameters and photos on a specific lot. Conversations with growers moved from recollection to records.
• Farmers are paid from data, not paperwork: Finance releases payments from verified intake and ledger records without manual slip matching. Payment stopped depending on how fast paper could travel from a village to head office.
• Dispatch runs on stock that exists: Buyer commitments are matched to lot-level inventory and trucks move against confirmed positions. The advisory channel also gives the client a direct line to its grower base between seasons.