Digital Lead, Farm of the Future

Position Title: Digital Lead, Farm of the Future 

Position Type: Regular - Full-Time ​

Position Location: Florenceville Main 

Requisition ID: 30997 

This role will be based out of Florenceville, New Brunswick, Canada at our Farm of the Future. 

We know the importance that food plays in people's lives – the power it has to bring people, families, and communities together. Our purpose is to bring enjoyment to people’s lives through great-tasting food, in a way that reflects our values.
 

OVERVIEW

McCain is embarking on a sustainable Regenerative agriculture transformation Journey at our farms to become a leader in sustainable agronomy practices, and digital farming to increase crop productivity including applying precision agriculture and leveraging data and analytics to make decisions in every step and transfer the knowledge to our growers around the world.  As part of this transformation, we are elevating the way that we use technology, digital processes, data, and analytics to drive value, and efficiency and enhance decision-making by building data-driven sustainable digital solutions. To help drive this exciting transformation journey, we are seeking a curious, creative, innovative, and data-driven individual with a proven background in digital, analytical, problem-solving, and change management.

The Digital Lead will play a key role in creating standard business processes and procedures, building digital solutions to automate and enable architecture to connect farm activities data end to end, implementing precision agriculture integrating analytics and AI into farm operations, and supporting the operationalization of R&D technology projects to drive sustainable, repeatable regenerative agriculture practices. This role will be key to transforming our McCain farms to become best-in-class digitally enabled data-led precision farms. You will work with McCain Farms, cross-functional and cross-regional teams as well as our technology team data sciences teams, research, and university partners.  

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Own and enhance McCain farms architecture build a connected smart digital farm and implement precision agriculture methods and tools 

• Working with Farm managers to create standard business processes for all activities, including data capture in every step, supporting operating procedures to onboard farm team members

• Working with a cross-functional team to build and implement digital solutions at the farm and data to share actionable insights with McCain Farms, Growers, and other key stakeholders

• Work with cross-functional teams to build centralized data collection architecture, and data model to store and report on all data capture using digital tools, machinery, IOT, internal and external data   

• Support smart and sustainable agriculture strategy and roadmap development related to digital, data sources, tools, capabilities, processes, dashboards, and whitespace opportunities, etc.

• Build relationships with McCain Farms globally to identify value-driving use cases for digitalizing farm activities and use analytics / AI

• Work with farm team members and train them to follow the standard process and data collection in every step to analyze, measure, and report to improve farm practices

• Conduct data quality analysis to identify data issues at the early stage and address the issues, develop dashboards and reports to support the decision-making processes

• Work with interns and graduates and standardize data collection and process mapping, build dashboards, reports, and models as required

• Define and scope a delivery approach against targeted use cases; confirm KPIs and expected value delivery. Mockup Proof-of-concept (POCs) or wireframes of analytics outputs to ensure alignment with stakeholders

• Proactively partner with cross-functional and cross-regional colleagues to deconstruct Farm business issues, generate hypotheses, and build/scale digital and analytics tools   

• Prepare and present executive-ready presentation materials and deliverables, with a strong ability to craft a compelling narrative to clearly explain digital, data concepts and insights to a grower base

• Be a champion of change to improve data literacy at the farms and growers  

• Lead medium to large-scale projects with close collaboration with technology and McCain Farms and be a key contact to address all technical issues at the farm

• Participate in Farm activities to improve the use of digital and data solutions

SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE WILL SHOW:

• Demonstrated a history of driving change in the organization

• Implemented sustainable standard practices and supporting digital solutions

• Knowledge and experience working with digital, data to drive decision making   

• Strong awareness of data best practices and what’s possible with rich data

• Excellent communication skills and ability to build compelling narratives with Digital and data and convince stakeholders

• Ability to frame and complete a high-level business case as part of driving change

• Have a “get things done” attitude.  This role is about inspiring change, but committing to your business leaders to get them the data they need

• Ability to “get hands dirty” and hands-on, and develop digital solutions, dashboards, and work with Technology teams

KEY QUALIFICATION & EXPERIENCES:

• Master’s degree in Data Analytics / AI or other relevant combination of education and experience

• Experience in building standard processes and procedures, architecture designs and methodologies to manage projects

• Experience with requirement analysis (interviewing, facilitation, gap analysis, data analysis, business process mapping, user interface design, and mock-up)

• Experience in data management, data models, data mining, and conduct data quality

• Comfortable working with business stakeholders across a range of experiences with Growers, Digital data, and analytics

• Able to establish a case for change and “sell” an idea; comfortable challenging the status quo and suggesting alternative business processes inspired by data and technology

• Experience with managing and influencing executive-level audiences, including meeting facilitation, hypothesis generation, and delivering conclusions

• Self-starter, and team player with good interpersonal and presentation skills (talking, writing, reasoning, articulating).

• Able to explain Digital and data concepts in a way that is approachable and compelling

• Experience in translating use cases, and requirements to Data Science/IT teams/R&D partners/universities and translating results into insights for the business

• Knowledge or experience working with commonplace ML techniques/models

• Minimum three years of experience working in building and implementing standard practices  and experience data visualization tools (Power BI preferred)

• Experience working in a SCRUM or agile environment would be a great asset

• Understanding of SQL or any other programming languages such as Python, R or SAS   

• Experience in spatial data analysis would be an asset

• Experience in the agriculture business would be an asset

#LI-MCCAIN24

McCain Foods is an equal opportunity employer. We see value in ensuring we have a diverse, antiracist, inclusive, merit-based, and equitable workplace.  As a global family-owned company we are proud to reflect the diverse communities around the world in which we live and work. We recognize that diversity drives our creativity, resilience, and success and makes our business stronger. 
 
McCain is an accessible employer. If you require an accommodation throughout the recruitment process (including alternate formats of materials or accessible meeting rooms), please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.
 
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Job Family: Agriculture      
Division: Global Agriculture 
Department: ​Global Agriculture - Data Center ​
Location(s): CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Florenceville-Bristol || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Bathurst || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Centreville || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Edmundston || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Fredericton || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Grand Falls || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Hartland || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Moncton || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Saint John || CA - Canada : New Brunswick : Somerville 

Company: McCain Foods (Canada)