[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Progress is a human invention.
We look at our world, and we imagine how to make it better.
From small challenges to impossible odds, great ideas,
and not-so-great ideas, and breakthroughs,
that's the power of human ingenuity.
We can redefine what's possible.
At Bayer, we're shaping the future of agriculture,
farms where all life grows together,
tools that help plants and farmers use
less water, crops that can help raise communities out
of poverty.
It's not impossible.
It's progress.
MARTIN NIEUWOUDT: Hi, I'm Martin Nieuwoudt,
engineering lead for customer data at Bayer Crop Science.
MUNIRA GANDHI: Hello, I'm Munira Gandhi, enterprise architect
at Bayer Crop Science, a Google leader at Cognizant
with Data Plus practice.
MARTIN NIEUWOUDT: At Bayer Crop Science,
we're harnessing the spirit of innovation
to shape what's possible for farmers, partners,
and the planet.
For more than 150 years, we've used the creative spark
that comes from human ingenuity to advance
the human race forward through scientific innovation.
Like everyone at Bayer, I like exploring,
and since moving to the US in early 2019,
I've made a point of exploring this wonderful country
with my family.
We do this in the form of an annual road trip taking us out
of the hustle and bustle of St. Louis to quieter,
more secluded parts of the country.
We've been west to Colorado, north to Minnesota, and most
recently, south to Florida.
A couple of things really struck me on these road trips.
One, how diverse, beautiful, and vast
this country is; two, how incredibly hard
it is to form this beautiful land; and three, how
easy Google Maps makes it to answer the inevitable,
"Are we there yet?"
question that pops up now and then.
I recall in 2019, driving miles to cross
the swollen Mississippi River, seeing
only the very top of barns and silos visible above the water.
Last year, in 2020, driving mile after mile
through Iowa with corn flattened to the ground
by unusually strong winds, hearing over
the radio about another town being evacuated on the West
Coast due to raging wildfires.
And this year, we have flooding from an overactive tropical
storm season in the East while we
had what some call the worst drought
in modern history in the West.
Mother Nature can be cruel.
If you're a farmer, you often bear the brunt of that cruelty.
Anyone who's ever tried to wrangle customer data
will tell you that it's a very challenging task.
This is due in part to the customer data system
landscape that is broad and lacks standardization.
The data is contained in internal systems, such as ERP,
which is generally standardized and well-maintained; CRM,
which is less standardized; and data in the public domain
and from social media data customers supply themselves;
and the one we all know and love--
good old-fashioned spreadsheets.
To get to the 360-degree view of a customer,
one has to ingest and harmonize data from all these sources,
a tough ask indeed.
Add to that the labyrinth of ever-changing and expanding
data privacy laws you need to adhere to,
and consolidating customer data in 2021
could easily be one of Hercules's 12 labors.
Our mission of health for all, hunger none
dictates that we have an obligation to do this.
We are digitally transforming agriculture and continuously
looking for ways to ensure we are best leveraging our data
and insights and balancing that information
with the key challenges going on around the world
and within our customers' landscape.
We are constantly evaluating better ways
to support farmers across the globe
with cutting edge products and technologies to help them grow,
protect, and increase harvest.
We have mature platforms serving product, climate,
and geospatial information.
The missing piece to that puzzle,
however, is in anchoring this information
in a consolidated customer profile
in a way that helps them with the daunting task of farming
in 2021.
One cannot accurately recommend a product combination without
understanding what a customer bought last year,
what weather patterns the product was grown in, how
the product performed in those real-world conditions,
and what climatic conditions might be prevalent
in the coming year.
MUNIRA GANDHI: So as you heard from Martin,
very complex relationships exist between the data elements.
For example, a single farmer customer
can have multiple companies through which
they buy the bio products.
The same farmer can also be a partner, buying products
from buyer, to resell to other farmers,
as well as can be part of a larger buying
group or a farmers' union.
All this information is very important to us.
To get to the 360-degree view of the farmer,
the information currently resides in disparate systems
or is maintained in spreadsheets.
To further add to the complexity of the problem
that we are trying to solve, Bayer
operates in more than 100 countries across the globe.
The go-to-market strategy, operating model,
source systems, size and data complexity, data privacy rules,
and maturity of capabilities significantly
vary across the countries.
With such a large and varied business,
a host of both proprietary and non-proprietary systems,
the solution has to be scalable, flexible, performant,
and cost effective.
MARTIN NIEUWOUDT: In a nutshell, we needed an easy way
to consolidate customer data from disparate sources
to build a 360-degree view of our customers and partners.
We needed to understand our customers and partners better,
how they interact with each other, what relationships
they have, and use this information
to act as a foundation for our internal processes and tools
to provide the best product recommendation that
suits our customer needs.
This is where Google and Cognizant came into play.
We joined forces with Google and Cognizant
and collaboratively crafted the Global Customer Data
Environment solution.
Our solution's key tenets where scalability and agility,
data governance and security for faster decision-making
with an enterprise view.
Google's BigQuery meets our needs
for scalability in a modern data warehouse.
The Cognizant solution's vision aligned
with what we were aiming for, and with Cognizant
being a preferred implementation partner at Bayer
for more than five years, we trust their ability
to help us meet our targeted outcomes for the GCDE solution.
MUNIRA GANDHI: As Bayer Crop Science
embarks in the Global Customer Data Environment initiative
with varying needs and level of maturity.
Planning, alignment, and prioritization
is key to a successful execution.
As Bayer Crop Science embarks on the Global Customer Data
Environment initiative with varying needs and level
of maturity, planning, alignment, and prioritization
is a key to successful execution.
We have crafted a thoughtful solution
that incorporates our understanding of Bayer's
organization.
We aligned with Bayer's business and technology
vision of scalable and future-ready architecture.
Another challenge, scalable solution architecture
that meets Bayer's vision.
Our technology solution point of view
aligned with Bayer's technology vision and roadmap
of Google Cloud platform to reduce total cost of ownership
and optimized cost economics, along
with an off-the-shelf ambient solution
to build customer golden record.
Our reference architecture is based on FAIR principles
to enable a unified customer 360-view,
Google views to authorize access, and integrated Google
architecture for provisioning data
to the downstream applications and BI tools.
We are building reusable frameworks
for audit, metadata management, data and lineage,
and data governance.
One of the other key challenges around data ingestion,
especially with all the legacy and disparate systems,
there are multiple ingestion patterns.
Google's data flow has capability
of ingesting real time and batch data, which
helps us to meet our key requirements of data ingestion.
We are leveraging Bayer's ingestion framework
using Kafka, along with Google native services.
Data prep recipes is leveraged during the ingestion
flow for data cleanup and transformation.
We are building bi-directional data extraction
to the CRM system to ensure the customer authentication
and creation in real time.
Data provisioning.
Data is stored in Google's BigQuery raw layer.
Using data flow and BigQuery SQL,
we are transforming and processing
data to build clean, consistent, and curated data store
and enterprise-wide massively scalable data warehouse
to provide a unified 360 view.
We are building a cross-reference
with customer location and product details
to create a full customer 360 data
view into Google's BigQuery Crop Science warehouse.
We enable data provisioning from BigQuery consumption layer
via APIs, SQL, and extracts to the downstream applications
and BI tools.
The Crop Science warehouse enables data science team
to implement advanced machine learning.
MARTIN NIEUWOUDT: Standardizing on GCDE
and better leveraging and streamlining all our data
sources, the expectation is that we
will be able to serve our customers better.
The Cloud-integrated architecture
with AI and machine learning technologies and BigQuery ML
improves our data science and BI processes
for customer hyper personalization, marketing,
and business decision making.
Agriculture is a seasonal business,
which means if the information is not
available in a timely fashion, customer
may miss their optimal planting window.
If the different systems are not aware of a farmer also
being a partner, they may not get the correct discount,
which hampers customer satisfaction, which
is where BigQuery's omni multiple Cloud analytics
and GIS comes into play.
Customers and partners are key to our business,
and taking care of them is our top priority.
Finally, data privacy regulations
are rapidly driving the need to change how businesses handle
customer data to ensure compliance and protect
our customers' privacy.
We value our customers' privacy, and the GCDE DLP toolset
offers a variety of tools to enable Bayer Crop
Science to comply with the varying landscape of data
privacy compliance regulations and future changes
to the compliance landscape.
Also, it helps us to keep our customers'
data private and secure.
By moving to Google Cloud, we anticipate
being able to go to market five times faster than before.
We also expect performance gains in excess of 60%
and a significant reduction in operating cost.
MUNIRA GANDHI: A compelling challenge
around global solution and a unified view
was the key aspect.
We understand the different business parameters
of various locations, products, customer partners, business
has seasonal needs as for location,
various geographical aspects across the regions globally.
With that, we have BigQuery multi region serverless
and scalable architecture, which provides a global view that
resolves the challenge of providing
a unified global customer 360 view,
regional, local logical data marks,
helps with country specific needs.
Dataplex, Google's latest data services,
will be leveraged for the governance
of these logical data marks, utilizing the best practices,
partitioning and clustering for performance and cost
optimization.
Partitioning on data fields and clustering on the country
filters enables fast query execution
that helps building the logical country-specific use or data
models.
Another the challenge around data privacy,
Google's authenticated encryption
with associated data, AEAD, lets you encrypt individual values
within BigQuery.
The encrypt-decrypt will be part of the SQL query
and, hence, will also be logged.
Encryption is also done in the data flow,
and the encryption keys that are customer
managed keys are also stored on Google Cloud Storage.
We leverage data loss protection,
Inspect API to ensure that all the PII fields are tagged
correctly and PII tokenization is
taken care of as needed by the country-specific rules.
Speed to market, ambient out-of-the-box solution with
fully integrated architecture on the Google platform provides
a quick turnaround time for global implementation
of the unified view, enabling a quick speed to market solution
for Bayer Crop Science to achieve their objectives.
Cognizant's DataOps framework for CI/CD implementation,
with our factory, broad-based execution,
approach accelerates the development, testing,
and deployment journey.
MARTIN NIEUWOUDT: Bayer Crop Science
has chosen GCDE as our preferred platform and Cognizant
as our global system integrated partner
to build the Crop Science warehouse to host data
from disparate sources and create
a warehouse for analytics and business intelligence.
Cognizant is a premier Google partner
that combines the right culture, talent, and technology,
all while unlocking and reinventing innovation.
They also provide expertise and heritage
in data, AI, and modernization services.
We are leveraging Cognizant's IP tools and accelerators,
reference architecture, migration framework, studios,
and more.
In partnership with Cognizant, we
are also building our [INAUDIBLE],, enterprise data
hub framework, and other initiatives
to synergize and align the enterprise architecture.
In closing, Bayer continues our digital transformation journey.
For further optimizing our customer offerings,
we look forward to our continued partnership with GCDE
and cognizant to advance our role
in contributing to a better environment and sustainable
future for our world.
MUNIRA GANDHI: We have successfully
executed data modernization with Fortune 500 companies
to achieve their business goals, and we
can help you start and/or implement your data
and analytics need.
To explore how we can help your organization
and provide a complimentary assessment,
please email us at datamoreonGCDE@cognizant.com.
Thank you for listening in, and thanks, Google,
for a wonderful opportunity to share our story.
Thanks, Martin and Bayer Crop Science,
for partnering with us.