Avid Solutions is a research and development firm with a bold mission to revolutionize food production and sustainable agriculture by helping government agencies establish self-sustaining agricultural systems both terrestrial and in space. Its services include conducting initial crop growth experiments, scaling up agricultural systems, establishing supply chains and developing transportation systems.

The firm’s team of experts are laser-focused on identifying and implementing solutions that support the development of sustainable food production systems both terrestrial and in space. But there are also the day-to-day logistics of operating a consultancy to consider.  “Customer onboarding, project management and expense reporting are critical tasks for our business, but they are also time-consuming and error-prone,” explains Dr. Malcolm Adams, Chief Executive Officer, Avid Solutions.

To help reduce errors and alleviate operational burdens, Dr. Adams and his team started using the IBM^® watsonx^™ Orchestrate solution to automate repetitive tasks undertaken by employees such as customer service representatives, project managers and accountants. The workstreams they have started optimizing include customer onboarding, project management and expense reporting. Watsonx Orchestrate has helped the team automate the many steps in these lengthy and error-prone processes that are critical to the business. “By automating tedious workstreams with Orchestrate, we are now able to free up our employees to focus on more strategic work and their own development, while also improving the overall efficiency of our operations,” adds Adams.

Document delivery and processing are some of the early use-cases Adams and his team at Avid Solutions have implemented. “For the document processing workstream, watsonx monitors emails as they come in. It looks for emails that have a specific set of criteria, like a subject line and document attached, and it will then send the document to a specific repository in our cloud-based filing system,” explains Adams. This use-case is just the beginning.

Adams and his team have already observed meaningful improvements resulting from their implementation of watsonx Orchestrate. Not only have they reduced the number of errors that occur in their project management processes by 10%, but they have also reduced the time it takes to onboard new customers by 25%. “We have also seen a number of qualitative benefits from Orchestrate. Our employees are more satisfied with their jobs because they are no longer bogged down by repetitive tasks. We have also seen an improvement in customer satisfaction because we are able to respond to customer inquiries more quickly and efficiently,” notes Adams.

As they look ahead, the team’s goals for the watsonx Orchestrate implementation are to reduce the time it takes to onboard new customers by 50%, reduce the number of errors in their project management process by 20%, increase customer satisfaction by 10% and reduce employee turnover by 5%. “We believe that these goals are achievable, and we are committed to working with Orchestrate to achieve them,” adds Adams.

Avid Solutions (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a research and development firm with a bold mission to revolutionize food production and sustainable agriculture by helping government agencies establish self-sustaining agricultural systems both terrestrial and in space. The team includes a range of experts in aerospace engineering, agriculture, robotics and sustainability who can help government agencies develop and deploy sustainable food production systems in space.