Modernizing Agriculture at Scale with Powerful Collaborative Applications

The Solution

Hatching a Modern Enterprise

P. D. Hook began its modernization journey by creating an HCL Domino application known as its Hatchery Book — a daily journal that records every significant event and transaction that occurs across all nine hatcheries. The Hatchery Book provides a rich source of operational and financial information that helps the company and its suppliers make efficient day-to-day decisions, and has become its most business-critical system. The success of the Hatchery Book project sparked a proliferation of other HCL Domino applications, which the company uses to handle processes such as just-in-time delivery for the live haulage team, demand forecasting for the breeders, and vehicle mileage for the leasing team.

Nigel Boyle relays, “The thing that really impresses me about the HCL Domino platform is the effort that HCL puts into maintaining backward compatibility. If we’d built these applications using a traditional SQL database, we would have needed to rewrite them numerous times over the years as the technology changed. But when we move to a new version of Domino, everything just works — there’s no extra development effort.”

Over the course of its journey with HCL Notes and Domino, P. D. Hook has also introduced other HCL solutions such as HCL Sametime for instant messaging, HCL Connections for secure file sharing, and BigFix for managing its estate of devices.

“Domino is still at the core of everything we do, but it’s great to have the ability to integrate with other HCL products to add more functionality,” says Nigel Boyle.

While the core of the business has been relying on Domino applications for more than two decades, there was still a final frontier to cross. Many of P. D. Hook’s employees work at sites in remote locations, which are not connected to the company’s network. Communicating data to headquarters still involved faxing printed records, which meant the organization was not yet completely paperless.

To solve the challenge, the company partnered with Intec System to pilot a new Domino mobile app to run on iPads using a special IoT SIM card. Employees at remote sites — starting with the company’s acquired turkey-farming business — were able to key data directly into the app and rely on Domino’s powerful data replication capabilities to sync with the company’s central servers whenever they have a mobile data connection.

Nigel Boyle comments: “We’ve built a good relationship with Intec — we trust them to act as an extension of our own in-house Domino development team, and they’ve already made a valuable contribution by helping us build APIs to integrate some of our existing apps with external services.”