Founded in 1913 in Harsewinkel, Germany, CLAAS is today the technology leader in the agricultural sector for self-propelled forage harvesters, tractors and combine harvesters. In addition to the machines themselves, the product range also includes a wide range of information technologies.
Malfunctions or breakdowns in a farmer's fleet are time-consuming matters that can be reduced with the CLAAS TELEMATICS app. The app for Android and iOS is the mobile complement to the CLAAS TELEMATICS portal, which provides the farmer with all important operating data thanks to a digital data transfer system.
The TELEMATICS app provides an overview of key operating, track and yield data to ensure optimum use of each machine.
Status information on each individual TELEMATICS-equipped machine keeps the combine, forage harvester or tractor running smoothly, helping to reduce downtime.
The CLAAS TELEMATICS team asked us to implement the Android and iOS apps after we had previously supported the team with the farm management apps.
Functionally, the TELEMATICS app should only be slightly inferior to the portal in the area of creating fields and field boundaries. Like other CLAAS apps, the CLAAS TELEMATICS app uses Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS. This allowed us to use native UI design and controls while reusing the connection to the backend between the two platforms.
It was important to CLAAS that both apps feel like native apps while still producing a high level of reusable code. By using Xamarin, we were able to meet this requirement in the best possible way.
To our delight, it quickly became apparent that the app was so well received that the service technicians also used the TELEMATICS app for their work on and with the machines. This presented us with the challenge of how to keep performance consistently high when 3 to 5 times the original average number of machines needed to be managed by the app.
Thanks to Xamarin's close proximity to the native Android and iOS APIs, we were able to use Xcode Instruments and the Android Studio Profiler to tune the app's performance to meet the new requirements.
TELEMATICS enables farmers and service technicians to keep track of farm and machines and thus make efficient decisions - an essential building block in our digitalization strategy. Cayas Software worked closely with us to develop the TELEMATICS app and did a great job, especially in scaling it for a large number of users and machines.
- Sven Kreft, Director E/E Segment Data Management CLAAS E-Systems
Cayas has been a great partner to work with. The passion and willingness to implement things quickly and optimize them until they run to your complete satisfaction was always evident. The exchange was always professional and based on partnership. Even the one or other spontaneous extra request was no problem for the team around Sebastian and Martin.
- Andreas Kipp, development engineer CLAAS E-Systems GmbH