BouMatic is one of the most successful dairy equipment suppliers in the United States, producing everything from cooling tanks to automated milking machines to help dairy farmers be more profitable. Headquartered in Wisconsin, the heart of dairy country, BouMatic distributes its products around the globe, facilitating the efficient production of high-end dairy products from Milwaukee to Myanmar.

Dairy Farm Management equipment and software does everything from direct cows through automated gates, to milking machinery with sensors that detect the quality of the milk. The software tracks activities such as equipment operation, productivity, storage, inventory, parts and transport.

BouMatic found itself facing a rapidly evolving marketplace with an aging solution that, while once a powerful advantage over its competitors, had become a roadblock in its efforts to modernize.  An offline siloed software application, it forced dairy farmers managing their farms to adopt an outdated solution and buy exclusively compatible equipment from BouMatic. While the machinery that BouMatic provided for milking the cows was high quality, the growth potential of the software, both for BouMatic and dairy farmers, was limited.

The elements necessary to make a modernized and expandable dairy farm management suite ranged from designing an open protocol to support connection of dairy equipment over networks, Wi-Fi, the internet or local robust CANBUS wiring. The protocol would allow users to subscribe hardware (and software) to a central farm administration system.

This central system, also designed by Skyward, exposed an offline-accessible web-connected management User Interface to allow farm owners to see the status of their equipment and the data produced by that equipment at a glance. Further, as improvements in dairy hardware and methodology happen at a rapid pace, the system was designed to be easily extensible to prevent BouMatic from simply arriving at the same problem five years down the road.