SeineYonne is an agricultural cooperative founded in 2008.
It counts 148,263 acres of wheat, 91,429 acres of barley, and 84,015 acres of rapeseed.
For a long time, all their data reporting was done manually. Representatives would visit each parcel, write down the type and quantities of products produced, and report back to HQ to log the information manually into Airtable.
This process was ineffient and prone to error.
In 2019, SeineYonne started digitizing this process. They hired a freelancer to build a Bubble UI on top of the data in Airtable. That way, people working at each parcel could report the data remotely.
Unfortunately, this process created issues of its own.
The web app built with Bubble and Airtable was unsatisfactory for both SeineYonne's tech team and end-users.
Performance - Users were unhappy because the app was too slow. It caused delays that created errors in the database. The app was supposed to save them time but it was having the opposite effect.
Inefficient - Nobody on the team was comfortable using Bubble. They found it hard to work with and often needed external support from freelancers, slowing down things further.
Costs - The downside of relying on freelancers meant that, every time they wanted to make an improvement, it was hard to predict how long it would take and how much it would cost.
Part of the reason the Airtable/Bubble integration didn't perform well is because the Airtable base had gotten very complex over a long period of time.
Still, SeineYonne wasn't ready to migrate away from Airtable at this point and needed to find a solution
From experience, Ludovic knew that finding and hiring a developer to build the app within budget would be close to impossible.
He explored three options to improve the digital data reporting process.
He evaluated each solution against a clear set of criteria:
Ludovic talked to web agencies, asked them for their opinion on the best solutions to build web-apps with no-code, and evaluated whether they could do the job for him.
In the end, he found that hiring an agency would be too expensive and wouldn't solve the autonomy issue of his team.
Ludovic hired a new Bubble expert to debug the existing tool and improve its performance. At that point, a lot of the app had to be re-built from scratch.
In the end, the second version of the Bubble app was still short in performance and autonomy continued to be an issue.
Every time the team wanted to make an improvement, it was hard to predict how long it would take and how much it would cost.
In order to find a solution to these problems, Ludovic tried and reviewed a number of other no-code platforms like WeWeb, DronaHQ, Retool, StackerHQ, and Softr.
He felt that:
WeWeb satisfied all four pre-defined criteria:
also satisfied a fifth criteria that wasn't top of mind at the beginning of the project but was starting to grow in importance.
The v2 of the Airtable + Bubble app was still performing poorly despite the time and finances invested in optimizing it. What if SeineYonne needed to restructure their database or integrate Bubble with another database?
How much time and money would that cost?
With decoupling at the heart of WeWeb's vision, Ludovic bet it was the right solution for SeineYonne's long-term vision.
WeWeb delivered on its promises.
The new FarmPilot web app was delivered within three months, right on time.
The SeineYonne team can deploy weekly improvements without having to hire a new developer, agency or freelancer.
End-users have gained in productivity – mission accomplished for Ludovic!
SeineYonne are no longer reliant on Airtable. They can connect any external backend and add multiple data sources in WeWeb.
In fact, they are about to release a new version of FarmPilot, using Supabase as their database and authentication system.
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