Team Titans Season 4, Episode 1 - Hans Bakker

Ryan Spilken:

Hello everyone, and welcome to Team Titans. This is a podcast that highlights the stories of people with unique perspectives and stories about work itself. They are defining processes, they're building tools, they're leading teams, and they're changing the world. I am your host, Ryan Spilken and joining me today on co-hosting duties is the one and only Andy Kirk. Andy, good afternoon.

Andy Kirk:

Good afternoon, Ryan. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Ryan Spilken:

It's always a pleasure to see you, and thank you so much for hosting today. Andy, your role at Adaptavist, you're a partner manager, yeah?

Andy Kirk:

Yeah. Channel partnerships manager. It's always a job that's difficult to explain at parties, but I think the people listening to this will know what I do. I work with our reseller partners, keep them up to date, make sure we're all heading on the right path and generally get on.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, someone's got to do it.

Andy Kirk:

Yeah.

Ryan Spilken:

All right, Andy. Today we get to tell a very cool story that came out of your partnership world. And that is for a customer called the Rainforest Alliance. Some folks out there in internet land listening to this show might have heard of the Rainforest Alliance today, but they came to our attention through our partnership with a company called DEMICON. And so without further ado, representing the Rainforest Alliance on our show today is Hans Bakker. Hans is the product owner for the Palm Industry Platform at Rainforest Alliance. Hi, Hans. Welcome.

Hans Bakker:

Hi Ryan, hi Andy. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be part of this.

Ryan Spilken:

Oh, well, Hans, it's a real pleasure to meet you and to see you, and I can't wait to hear more about your work with the Rainforest Alliance. And before we talk with you much more, Hans, we have to introduce our colleague from DEMICON as well. It's Christian Wiemer. Christian, welcome to Team Titans.

Christian Wiemer:

Hello. Hello, Ryan. Hello, Andy. Hello, Hans. It's an honour to be here.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, thank you, Christian. It's very nice to see you; glad you're here. Now, before we get started, just to hear a little bit about the two of you, Hans, I heard it was your birthday last week.

Hans Bakker:

It was.

Ryan Spilken:

Happy birthday.

Hans Bakker:

Thank you very much.

Ryan Spilken:

You look just right for your age, which I have no idea what that is. Now, what did you do to celebrate?

Hans Bakker:

I did a small day trip over the weekend, so thankfully I had the weekend to celebrate. So I went out with my partner on an e-scooter, or e-moped rather, through the countryside. And in the Netherlands near Amsterdam, where we live, the weather usually isn't too good, but it just happened to be really sunny that day. So yeah, took an electric moped out for a spin. And it was an experience. We got lost a few times. We missed a few turns here and there, but overall it was an adventure really, really, exciting. Really memorable.

Ryan Spilken:

That sounds wonderful, Hans. I have to ask, did it look like a Vespa?

Hans Bakker:

I wanted it to look like a Vespa, but unfortunately, it just looked like a really boring, shared e-moped. So it was a bit of an eyesore, I got to admit, but...

Ryan Spilken:

Okay. All right. Well, anytime you're wearing helmets and getting to put along going, "Choo," I think it's a really great experience. And to stay on the transportation theme, which is, I think, accurate because Rainforest has to deal with a lot of logistics things. Christian, you've bought a boat?

Christian Wiemer:

Yeah. That's what I did recently. Same as on my professional side, large projects, same I do in the private sector for me. Yeah, I bought a sailing boat. It was rather cheap and with that comes a lot of refurbishments and things to do, and I'm really looking forward to just searching time for that.

Ryan Spilken:

Now, this is a sailboat, right?

Christian Wiemer:

It is, yeah.

Ryan Spilken:

Okay. So this is like a Jeff Bezo's sized sailboat, a gigantic yacht? And the big masts and everything, is that right?

Christian Wiemer:

It got a mast, but I think it would fit in one of the cabins of Jeff Bezos's yacht.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, happy sails.

Christian Wiemer:

A nice ring to it.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, I wish you a strong wind at your back, sir, wherever you decide to take this boat when it's time to go. Well, let's, let's get into it. Let's talk about the Rainforest Alliance. There's a lot of stuff going on in a rainforest. So Hans, tell us about the Rainforest Alliance itself. What's its mission? How does it work? What's it all about?

Hans Bakker:

Sure, sure. So the Rainforest Alliance does a lot. I'll try not to take you through a lecture on what we're working on, but basically, the Rainforest Alliance is an international NGO working between business, agriculture and forests. And basically, the ultimate aim is to make responsible business the new normal. And we do that firstly by building an alliance between companies, governments, civil society, and individuals. The whole purpose here is to protect forests, improve the livelihoods of farmers, and forest communities as well, and basically promote their human rights while also helping to mitigate and adapt to the various environmental problems that there are today.

Ryan Spilken:

That's a lot. Your particular area of focus was palm oil. Is that correct?

Hans Bakker:

Yeah, that's right.

Ryan Spilken:

Okay. All right. Let's come back to palm oil for just a second. Christian, tell us a little bit about Demicon.

Christian Wiemer:

Yeah. So Demicon is an IT service provider in Germany. So also for Austria and Switzerland, we've been founded back in 2008. Since then we've been starting a nice journey, mostly in the Atlassian ecosystem. Made it to a platinum solution partner, but also we got an AWS brand and other stuff we're working on. So yeah. It was a nice journey so far.

Andy Kirk:

Also getting a diamond Adaptavist partner as well. Top of the tree in Germany, yeah.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, we would not want to forget that. Fantastic. All right. Let's look back to the palm oil situation that the Rainforest Alliance is involved in. Supply chain management is the first thing that comes to mind, but your work at the Rainforest Alliance is focused around the palm industry. So this is palm oil, are the hearts of palm involved? Because those are delightful in a salad.

Hans Bakker:

No, unfortunately not. I do really like those, but I didn't have any through my job, unfortunately.

Ryan Spilken:

Oh, well, all right. What were some of the challenges that Rainforest Alliance is facing with the palm industry? Tell us a little bit about what's going on there.

Hans Bakker:

Yeah, sure. So basically the work that I've been involved in, specifically in the palm sector is part of the supply chain services and corporate advisory work that we do at Rainforest Alliance. And it's just one of maybe four key interventions that we do as an organization. So maybe I'll just go through those just to give a bit more context. So, we start firstly with certification. So we have a certification program that focuses around the certification of key tea crops, like tea, coffee, cocoa, and bananas. And a lot of consumers will be familiar with the cute green frog that you find on bananas at the supermarket, for example.

Hans Bakker:

That's basically a certification program in which voluntarily farmers and companies sign up for and are audited according to some pretty rigorous environmental, economic, and social standards. And then beyond certification, we work on integrated landscape management and that involves basically doing various kinds of community development programs. And that goes beyond the farm and includes not just farmers, but an entire community, government and also non-government organizations in a specific landscape.

Hans Bakker:

I think the best example that I can give you is the Mayan Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala. And there are various community development programs that Rainforest Alliance is involved in there. And a lot of people will be familiar with it, because if you've seen the first Star Wars film, but most people that are Star Wars fans will know it as Yavin 4, which is the rebel bass in the first Star Wars movie.

Hans Bakker:

So that's one example of integrated landscape management. And then we also do a lot of advocacy work and interventions with governments and companies and other NGOs. And lastly, getting to the more relevant palm oil part is corporate advisory supply chain services work. And that is really to support everything else that I just talked about, which is basically supporting companies with all the sustainability objectives and goals they have through their policies.

Hans Bakker:

And when it comes to palm oil, a lot of the companies that we work with source palm oil through their supply chains and in many cases... Well, firstly palm oil has always been a bit of a controversial crop, but a lot of work has been done in the past decades to make palm oil sustainable. And we work with various corporate partners to do basically a supply chain mapping of their palm oil suppliers. And that allows us to understand where palm oil is coming from and do various kinds of analysis through the data that we collect from palm oil suppliers.

Ryan Spilken:

I think it's no exaggeration to say that you are handling a mountain of complex data. Is that accurate?

Hans Bakker:

There's a lot of data. Yeah. We work with hundreds of palm oil companies throughout the palm oil supply chain. So there's a lot of data that we need to sieve through. Yeah.

Andy Kirk:

What are some of the pain points then? There are a lot of complex moving parts and organizations, you must be generating so much information. How did that work? How was it?

Hans Bakker:

Yeah, it's been quite a journey. So we started out collecting a lot of the information from these hundreds of palm oil companies using basic tools. We've started contacting them just by email, just with a shared mailbox. In the early days, we were basically collating all the data in one big Excel spreadsheet. And that's when we were just basically starting out with these kinds of projects, but really quickly, it became obvious that we weren't going to handle hundreds of companies and their data in just one Excel spreadsheet.

Hans Bakker:

It was impossible for us to do any sort of meaningful analysis like that. And also just almost impossible for a small team of people here at Rainforest Alliance to handle the communication, just by email. So those were the biggest pain points, that we were just handling a lot of data with a lot of different stakeholders and with limited resources. So we really needed a solution for that.

Andy Kirk:

That sounds like it was getting to be a lot of work for people and a hassle to maintain it and so on. Was there any kind of tipping point where you thought, "Enough's enough. Too much data overload. We need to do something about it?"

Hans Bakker:

Yeah. I mean, at some point we were of course developing the project further. So after the first full iteration, we then went into another iteration of the project and we were scaling up and trying to do more, but we were also being requested to do more from our partners. And we also needed to collect more data from more suppliers. So at that point, it was very difficult to do more as well as trying to do it in less time. It's the classic issue that we all face at work, I guess. At that point, we were just handing way too much data and we needed to find ideally some kind of a technology solution to help us manage all that.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah. And I'm feeling like this is where Christian steps in, right? This is where you reach out to a partner-

Andy Kirk:

Enter DEMICON.

Ryan Spilken:

And DEMICON answers the call, and Christian, you get together with Hans, day one, you're looking at this data, and what are your thoughts?

Christian Wiemer:

Maybe, I think it was later on the project because there are also props to Hans and [inaudible 00:14:25] because actually, they choose the tool themselves. They had brought Jira into your service management and they started using it in quite a nice way. So there, the basement was already there. So they had all the data in there. But then they came to, I think, maybe Hans correct me, but to some kind of a challenge, they need to sum up all these amounts of palm oil in the end, up to the original supplier, that was something that needed to be done more automatically and you had to script something, to give it the name. And that was actually where we came in. That was the point.

Ryan Spilken:

Ah.

Hans Bakker:

Exactly. Yeah.

Christian Wiemer:

But you're right, Ryan, when I first saw all this data and Hans introduced me to the platform, I was like, "Whoa, this is interesting."

Ryan Spilken:

All right. So you wanted to start collating the data across this deep lake, it sounds like you have a full basement as it were of data. And you're trying to build a house. You're trying to tell a story with that data. So most of the time when we find folks in this situation, automation creeps into the story. That's when, "Well, we need something to just do this. We can't do this manually. Or there's no function built-in." So tell us a little bit about some of the automations you built, and some of the ways that you manipulated the data to ease the pain.

Hans Bakker:

Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So some of the things, we first started looking at what Christian mentioned, which was trying to automate adding up. One of our KPIs related to palm oil so we were trying to track the percentage of palm oil that is being collected throughout the supply chain. And we just had a lot of data points and initially, we were just updating those data points manually.

Hans Bakker:

But like I mentioned, we were working with over 300 palm oil suppliers at any given time, but each of those suppliers had their own supply chain under them. So you can imagine like a tree diagram and the nodes just multiplying were very quickly downwards. We just needed a way to kind of bring that data together and do upward calculations with the numbers that we were collecting in a way that was automated because it just was not realistic to do it manually.

Ryan Spilken:

I think it behoves us to ask, so when it came time to start diving into the Jira data and unpacking it and manipulating it to work in the way that you needed to, was there really any other choice, but ScriptRunner?

Christian Wiemer:

To be honest, no. No, no. Have never had any second thoughts on that. That took me like one or two hours I think or could be, even more, I think it was maybe three meetings or something until I had the whole plan of everything, like these multiplied nodes and summing all up from the bottom to the top. But yeah. It was a nice project. I actually really enjoyed it like from the beginning, because it was also, for me a challenge to get all those things done.

Christian Wiemer:

But yeah, from the beginning it was like, "Okay, we need something. There's nothing on the shelf like you mentioned, we need to create some new stuff." That's what we did. We created scripts which were triggered and they just summed up the whole supply chain. Yeah. And that was just the beginning, from then on, we had a lot of meetings, Hans and I, and Hans, I think, every second meeting he came in with a new, "I have a new idea." Or he just gathered ideas from the Rainforest Alliance and was great.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, let's get into that a little bit. Tell us about the process of working together and revising things and maybe even the two of you came across some interesting discoveries as you were doing this work. Can you tell us some of that story, and how it was built together?

Hans Bakker:

Yeah, so we started out basically as it was just me and Christian and a couple of other colleagues from Rainforest Alliance, but it was mainly us really communicating on the technical and the process part of the platform and from the beginning, Christian and eventually the rest of the DEMICON team did an excellent job, helping us translate all these business requirements and technical requirements to an actual feature on the platform.

Hans Bakker:

And I never heard Christian or anyone else at DEMICON say that something is not possible. So really, kudos to them for always having a can-do attitude. But yeah, Christian and I have never seen each other in person, so despite working virtually even before COVID started, I think we managed to get a lot of work done and really, really make a great, great product out of fairly humble beginnings with Jira and the toolset that we had at the beginning.

Christian Wiemer:

I have to be honest. So I think there were occasions when you came with requirements; I was like, "I got to take away this one with me, meet me next week. I have to think about that one." But yeah.

Andy Kirk:

But he never said we can't do it.

Christian Wiemer:

We found the way most times.

Andy Kirk:

There's always a way. Yeah, yeah.

Christian Wiemer:

Yeah. There's always a way.

Andy Kirk:

Yeah. It sounds really innovative, though. Yeah. I mean the complexities of supply chains and the supply chains and the supply chains; it's mind-boggling, I think.

Christian Wiemer:

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the point where we started. So I think at the beginning when I stepped in, we still had Excel spreadsheets there with data we uploaded to Jira somehow. And that was actually the point where Hans came in and said, "Okay, we need some other form of collecting data." And then I think we came up with forms, and we presented on the Azure Service Management Portal for all the suppliers, and they had a login, and they could fill out all the data there and then we could move it on through the process and left all the emailing behind. Yeah.

Andy Kirk:

Yeah. And how does the work process change now, Hans? Have you retired the Excel spreadsheets, thankfully, or how's the day-to-day impact for you as a business being able to use this technology?

Hans Bakker:

Yeah. It's really changed dramatically. So we really went from working with the spreadsheet and sending a lot of emails manually to just having an almost entirely automated communication process. So I guess the first major low-hanging fruit that we tackled in this project was trying to get the communication part, the communication features through Jira set so that we could focus more on the rest of the work.

Hans Bakker:

So Christian and the rest of the team at DEMICON helped to automate a lot of the emailing that we do out of the platform. And that's really integrated into the general workflow that we have for the project and specifically different workflows in Jira, and that eventually linked to other features that we developed, so after that low-hanging fruit, which was the communication piece, we then tackled this online questionnaire. So through the forms that Christian mentioned, and that online questionnaire it allows these suppliers to fill out their sustainability information.

Hans Bakker:

And then, we basically take their responses and do further analysis with them. But since the beginning, we all basically took a gradual approach, a step-by-step approach and just more or less tried to tackle each problem before going on to the next one. So in that sense, the platform grew, I want to say in an organic, but also agile way. So it allowed us to really develop features that actually worked and were addressing the needs of the team at RA, but also the teams at the corporate partners that we have been working with. And yeah, I think that allowed us to get pretty far in the last couple of years.

Andy Kirk:

Yeah. Excellent. Is this something that, in terms of looking ahead, you could see are the uses for what might be next for Rainforest Alliance?

Hans Bakker:

So we'll definitely continue developing the platform even further. I think a lot of the workflow and the process behind the platform and the way that we do these supply chain mappings and sustainability assessments is pretty set. Now we are working to standardize this for other companies in different parts of the palm oil supply chain and really, the platform and the product that we've sort of developed through the platform, I think could be generalised for other sectors as well, not just palm.

Hans Bakker:

That's something that I think we'll hopefully look at in the future. And also just trying to standardise the content side of the platform. So we do sustainability assessments based on our own standard set of questions around palm oil sustainability. And now, we're going to adopt a framework known as the accountability framework initiative. And that's essentially a benchmark, a set of guidelines for companies to report on sustainability and social topics. So we're going to try and combine that content side of things of the platform and the various features that we have on there.

Ryan Spilken:

I have been known to harp on the Atlassian tools utility as a communications platform, more so than pure development or pure work tracking, et cetera. Really, it's just communication. Now, some people might push back on that, but that's not what we're here to do. Implementing this program, did it make the people's lives downstream of Rainforest easier? Were they able to get through with it, or were they able to communicate with Rainforest in a more seamless, frictionless way after this program was instituted? Do you feel like their days were improved as a result of this work?

Hans Bakker:

I think the overall process that these palm oil companies go through has been simplified a lot. It costs less time, firstly, because they're able to submit these assessments through an online portal. And previously, this was basically done mainly through Excel forms, which is you end up having very big files and it's difficult to send those through and very clunky to just fill them out.

Hans Bakker:

The market in general for these kinds of assessments pretty much uses a similar structure and a similar process because it's so difficult to, let's say, tailor these kinds of things on an online form. And it's just much easier to build it out manually, like Excel. So I think that the burden that is on these oil companies to fill out this information is a lot lighter. It takes a lot less time, I think, because it's just in one central platform that they can log onto with a username and password.

Hans Bakker:

And it just makes the reporting side a lot easier. So these palm oil companies are basically reporting to our main partner, and so, for example, we partnered with a very big retailer that is sourcing a lot of palm oil for various products. And basically, before, it was very difficult for all those palm oil companies to report on their various supply chain activities and also to report on their sustainability commitments, but through the platform, it's much easier for them to report in a unified way and in a way that our corporate partners can then view survey results and basically the responses that are submitted through the all online questionnaire in a digestible way. So overall, I think there's a huge difference in the way that the users are now benefiting from the platform compared to before when these assessments were done very manually.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah. At the end of the day, it's all about the end-user, right? Is their life getting better from this work? And if the answer is yes, I'm really thrilled, always really excited to hear that.

Andy Kirk:

So big thanks to Hans and DEMICON's marketing team. We've got a joint case study, so it's a great example of our partnership, the three parts of this whole story Adaptavist, providing the software, Hans having the vision and DEMICON providing the magic. So have a look at DEMICON's website, you can get German and English versions of their study, go to the Adaptavist site and you can see our version of it. So we'll put links into the podcast for that.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah, absolutely. You'll be able to find links to the DEMICON site and more information on our show notes page.

Ryan Spilken:

And that's it for this episode of Team Titans. Andy, thank you so much for joining me on the co-hosting duties. Your first time out, you've done. Great

Andy Kirk:

Pleasure, thank you, yeah, the weekend starts here now. It's Friday for all those who are listening.

Ryan Spilken:

And Christian Wiemer, Senior Consultant at DEMICON, thank you so much for joining us.

Christian Wiemer:

Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Ryan Spilken:

An honour meeting you. And finally, Hans Bakker, product owner for the Palm Industry Platform at Rainforest Alliance. Thank you so much for your time and the work that you do to make our forest a healthier place.

Hans Bakker:

Thanks a lot, guys. A pleasure to be here.