AgrarMarkt Austria accelerates grant processing with Oracle Database
Oracle Database spatial features and APEX allow Austria’s Agricultural Paying Agency (AMA) to accelerate the payment process for farmers.
“Oracle Database spatial features and APEX allow our farm inspectors to complete assessments 4X to 5X faster than before, with 100X fewer invalid/incorrect geometries in data processing.”
Business challenges
AgrarMarkt Austria (AMA) manages the payment of EU subsidies to farmers. Farmers apply for funding at AMA by providing information on what they grow and on which land parcel, making the process is highly dependent on accurate mapping of farm parcels. Data is entered online by the applicant using a combination of maps and satellite images. It’s then validated in a complex process using the spatial features of Oracle Database.
Before deploying Oracle Database spatial capabilities, surveys of Austria’s 132,000 farms by AMA’s field inspectors were a much more manual process. A farm inspection would often take days to complete. Data was collected with hand-written forms that were shipped to AMA for processing. Subsequent land use calculations for the entire country could then take 1 to 2 months to complete, and in the event of calculation errors, would need to be repeated. This could result in delays of several weeks before a farmer could receive funding.
Having everything we need in the one converged database—from spatial data to the ability to quickly generate reports and spin up APEX applications—helps us process grant requests in the shortest time possible.
Why AgrarMarkt Austria Chose Oracle
As a long-time Oracle Database user, AMA appreciates Oracle’s unique combination of converged database solutions, from spatial to JSON, and the ability to quickly spin up applications with APEX. All of this helps them provide a more efficient and reliable service to their customers.
Results
AMA inspectors running Oracle APEX applications on Android tablets can survey two farms per day, with GeoJSON data uploaded to a central database the same day—something that in the past could take several days. Even as system complexity has grown from 5bn geodetic calculations to 25bn operations, error rates have fallen by 100X, meaning less time-consuming manual verification, resulting in significantly reduced risk of funding delays for AMA’s customers.
As an added bonus, Oracle Database also allows AMA to publish a publically accessible ‘transparency database’ outlining funding grants, and to support about 150 regional offices that provide subsidy assistance to individual farmers.