Heatwave!, with ISAGRI
Through its software and media offering, ISAGRI supports farmers in decision making. Christophe Sigogneau, Group Administrative Director, tells us how the summer could have been extremely challenging if an error had not been very quickly handled by FiveForty itself.
A few months later, what assessment do you draw from this experience?
CS : We should never forget that errors are human. Clearly, it is necessary to further secure data imports internally within our system.
In a few words, what is ISAGRI’s core business?
Christophe Sigogneau : ISAGRI is a group specialized in IT solutions and agricultural publishing. Our main clients are cereal growers, livestock farmers, and winegrowers. Our mission is to inform them and provide farm management software solutions as well as advisory services to support their operations.
At the very beginning, what led you to work with FiveForty?
CS : We had a real need for additional support on the Dynamics 365 deployment for the Media division, which was not progressing at the same pace as the Software Publishing division.
That summer, an incident significantly disrupted operations. Can you explain the context?
CS : We engaged FiveForty with an administrator profile to deploy three new legal entities based on the existing company templates. For this deployment, we granted them access to the production environment to roll out the required configurations.
What happened then?
CS : During the configuration update, an error in the import file impacted all number sequences across the companies already in production. As a result, it became impossible to create any new records.
“Immediate response”
How did FiveForty react?
CS : Immediately. Jonathan Lascaux, CEO and partner at FiveForty, informed me straight away about the incident, its scope, and the immediate handling of the issue. For follow up, a dedicated support channel with a specific email address was set up for users. My main concern was being able to correct the issue without having to roll back the production environment.
Did the intervention resolve all the issues?
CS : The incident occurred on June 9, 2020. Within 48 hours, 90 percent of the errors had been corrected. By early July, the remaining gap was resolved, as it mainly concerned end of month processing.
What areas for improvement would you identify?
CS : Improvements are mainly on the ISAGRI IT side, particularly around centralizing production imports. The right to make mistakes exists, but there is no need to add barriers at every step. What matters is being vigilant about risky behaviors such as chaining tasks or reworking an exported file before re importing it.
If you had to recommend FiveForty, what would you say?
CS : Go for it. Don’t hesitate.
“The strength of empathy”
That said, what should people be mindful of?
CS : FiveForty’s business is closely tied to the people they recruit and the mindset of their teams. It is therefore important that FiveForty continues to hire while preserving its core values of listening, sharing, and innovation.
In your opinion, how does FiveForty differ from other integrators?
CS : I know very few, but FiveForty’s greatest strength lies in its empathy with clients. I also value their strong business expertise, which is essential. Combined with their listening skills, they demonstrate a deep understanding of needs that goes beyond technical aspects to include real usage and productivity.
Three words to describe them…
CS : Business expertise, technical expertise, professionalism.
On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate your relationship with FiveForty ?
CS : Even with the incident, the score remains the same: 5.
