Jesper Riis on Nearshoring, Smart farming, and the future of Episcope tool

The technology partnership between WaveAccess and SKOV A/S, the world’s leading supplier of climate and farm management solutions for livestock production, is an illustrative example of successful nearshoring. Together, WaveAccess and SKOV developed Episcope, an efficient, accessible and easy-to-use analytical tool for smart animal farming. Jesper Riis, the Project Manager of SKOV A/S shares the story and his feedback on our work.

What is the project the WaveAccess team is developing for SKOV?

WaveAccess made a web page for us which is a portal called Episcope where the farmer can go and get the insights into his chicken production. He can see the predicted slaughter weight of his chickens and can get warnings about how the production is actually going.

Creating the Episcope platform was the first step into the world of digitalization from SKOV. We didn’t have much experience within this field, so it was really nice to have a good partner to work with who has a lot of experience.

Tell us about your experience of collaborating with WaveAccess. What do you particularly value when working with the team?

I’ve been working with WaveAccess for 2,5 years now. One of the things I really value working with the WA team is that they spend a lot of energy trying to understand the business model and the problems they are trying to solve.

They are searching for the right solution instead of doing as I say, so they are very critical to what they are actually developing. So you can say that their work ethic plays a big role in why we chose them as a development company.

They are searching for the right solution instead of doing as I say, so they are very critical to what they are actually developing.

Esper S. Riis

Project Manager of SKOV

One of the great challenges while working with Agile software development is that the scope is constantly changing — that was also handled very nicely by the team. The team is really great at helping each other. And today I see the team as part of SKOV and not as part of a different company.

What benefits did nearshoring with WaveAccess bring you?

The team at WaveAccess have proven to be very efficient which is why we have chosen to use the Nearshore agreement with them, where we use them on a continuous basis. Even though we are working with the Nearshore solution, we still have the possibility to scale our team as we need. Due to the huge variety of developers hired at WA, they are actually able to provide you both quality assurance, documentation, development of course, but also design, and whatever a software project may need.

You know your team, and at the end of the day it makes everything more predictable and reduces your time-to-market.

Esper S. Riis

Project Manager of SKOV

You could expect there to be a lot of problems while working with the team that was sitting so far away, but we used a lot of video chats so that I could see the emotions of the person I’m talking to and he can see mine while we are talking about different tasks. A huge advantage of the Nearshore solution is that actually you always have the same people working for you. So, you know your team, and at the end of the day it makes everything more predictable and reduces your time-to-market.

What are the plans to further develop the Episcope platform together with WaveAccess?

Episcope was developed as a test to prove our digital market strategy. Due to its success it is now being implemented into a bigger platform with all the digital services. In the near future we need to optimize and make farming smarter. So, seeing it from my perspective, we are only scratching the surface when it comes to digitalization and IoT within farming.

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Earlier we told how WaveAccess helped Danish agriculture prepare for the future.