Grain Silo Management Platform for an Industrial Automation Company

Industry

Agriculture & AgriTech

Geography

Germany, Europe

Cooperation Period

12 months

Full stack product engineering across web, desktop, and mobile, delivering cloud-based grain monitoring, automation control, and inventory management for 300+ silo installations worldwide.

About the Client

The client is a family owned industrial measurement and automation company headquartered in Europe. Founded in 1999, they specialize in high precision signal measurement, sensor technology, and electronic control systems for agricultural and industrial applications.

Their grain management division designs and manufactures electronic monitoring hardware, including temperature and humidity sensor cables, CO₂ detectors, remote terminal units (RTUs), and weighing electronics. These hardware systems are installed across 300+ silo facilities globally, serving grain storage operators who manage flat, steel, concrete, and feeder silos across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

The company had well established hardware and embedded firmware capabilities. What they lacked was a modern software layer, a unified platform that could collect sensor data from their RTUs, present it to silo operators through web and mobile interfaces, and enable remote automation of ventilation, aeration, and inventory tracking across distributed sites.

Challenge

The client’s core strength was in hardware engineering and embedded systems. Their RTUs collected granular sensor data (temperature, humidity, CO₂, fill levels, weight) from every silo in an installation. But getting that data to the people who needed it, the silo operators, plant managers, and agricultural commodity traders, required a software ecosystem that the client’s internal team was not structured to build.

Their existing desktop monitoring application was a legacy Windows native tool that ran locally in the silo plant’s control room. It worked reliably for single site operations, but it could not support multi site management, remote access, or mobile alerting. As the client’s hardware installations expanded globally, the gap between what their sensors could measure and what their software could deliver became an operational bottleneck.

Silo operators increasingly expected to monitor grain conditions from their phones. Commodity traders needed multi site dashboards accessible from any browser. And the client’s own sales team found it harder to compete against newer entrants who offered cloud based monitoring out of the box, even when those competitors’ sensor hardware was substantially less precise.

The project brief was threefold. First, build a cloud based web application capable of aggregating data from multiple silo sites into a single interface. Second, develop a cross platform mobile app for field monitoring and push notification alerting. Third, modernize the desktop application using Electron.js so it could run cross platform while maintaining the full featured control room experience that existing customers depended on.

All three surfaces needed to communicate with the client’s RTU hardware through MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol designed for constrained IoT environments where network bandwidth is limited and connection reliability varies. The MQTT integration was the foundational technical constraint. Every architectural decision in the web, mobile, and desktop applications was downstream of how reliably the software layer could subscribe to, process, and visualize the real time telemetry stream from hundreds of sensors across dozens of facilities.

Solution

Clixlogix delivered a full stack grain management platform across three application surfaces in under three months, using a phased MVP approach that allowed the client to validate each delivery milestone with their existing silo customers before proceeding to the next phase.

Phase 1. Hardware Discovery and MQTT Integration Layer

The engagement began with what became the most consequential phase of the project: establishing a reliable software bridge between the client’s RTU hardware and the application layer. The client’s remote terminal units communicate sensor readings over MQTT, publishing telemetry data (temperature arrays, humidity readings, CO₂ concentrations, fill level measurements, and load cell outputs) to topic hierarchies organized by facility, silo, and sensor type.

The Clixlogix team built a Node.js based MQTT broker integration service that subscribes to the client’s topic structure, validates incoming payloads against expected sensor schemas, and persists normalized readings to MongoDB. The choice of MongoDB was deliberate. Grain telemetry data is high volume, append heavy, and varies in structure depending on the sensor configuration at each facility. A document oriented store allowed the team to handle schema variation across installations without requiring rigid table definitions for every possible sensor combination.

This integration layer also implemented connection resilience logic, including automatic reconnection with exponential backoff, message buffering during transient network outages, and dead letter handling for malformed payloads. In silo environments where industrial interference, power cycling, and intermittent connectivity are common, this layer became the reliability foundation for everything built above it.

Within three months, calls from Google Search increased 140%, and off season bookings grew 80%. The seasonal demand gap that had defined the business for years began to compress.

Why this phase mattered:
CallRail attribution data became the evidence base for every subsequent recommendation. When Clixlogix later proposed CRM and FSM adoption, the conversation was grounded in actual call volumes, lead sources, and conversion patterns.

Phase 2. GrainManager Web Application

With the MQTT integration layer stable, the team delivered the web application as the first user facing surface. Built in React, the GrainManager Web provides a multi site monitoring dashboard accessible from any modern browser. Plant managers and commodity traders use it to view real time sensor data across all connected silo facilities from a single interface.

The web application renders temperature distribution maps, humidity trend charts, CO₂ level indicators, and fill level gauges for every silo in a facility. Historical data analysis allows operators to compare current storage conditions against past readings across configurable intervals (daily, weekly, seasonal). An alarm management system triggers visual and email based alerts when any sensor reading breaches operator defined thresholds, enabling early detection of grain spoilage conditions.

Fan control functionality was integrated directly into the web interface, allowing authorized operators to activate or deactivate ventilation and aeration systems remotely. The system also supports fully automated fan control, where the software triggers aeration cycles based on real time temperature and humidity readings against operator configured target ranges. This automated ventilation reduced energy consumption by running fans only when conditions required intervention.

The weighing and inventory management module consumes data from the client’s load cells, flow scales, belt scales, and radar based fill level sensors. It provides real time inventory tracking across all connected silos, supporting truck filling station management, batch weighing workflows, and capacity planning.

Phase 3. GrainManager Mobile App

The mobile application was built in Flutter, delivering a single codebase for iOS and Android deployment. Designed for field use by silo operators who need to check conditions while physically on site or remotely during off hours, the app provides a streamlined view of the same telemetry data available in the web application.

Push notification integration was the critical mobile capability. When a sensor alarm triggers (temperature spike, humidity breach, CO₂ elevation), the mobile app delivers an immediate push notification to designated operators. This closed the gap that previously required operators to be physically present in the control room or periodically checking a desktop application to catch emerging spoilage conditions.

The app supports multi site monitoring, allowing operators who manage multiple facilities to switch between sites within a single session. Each silo’s data is presented through charts and structured tables, with the ability to generate and export PDF reports for compliance documentation and customer reporting.

Phase 4. GrainManager Desktop (Electron.js)

The existing legacy Windows desktop application served a specific and important role: it was the full featured control room interface used by on site plant operators at 300+ facilities. Replacing it entirely would have disrupted active installations. The Clixlogix team rebuilt the desktop experience using Electron.js, which preserved the dense, data rich interface that control room operators depended on while making the application cross platform (Windows, macOS, Linux).

The Electron desktop application retained all existing control room functionality, including granular sensor by sensor data visualization, manual and automated fan control, alarm journal (complete history of past alarm events), and direct RTU communication for facilities running in local only mode without cloud connectivity. It also added new capabilities: a webserver module for bridging local installations to the cloud platform, API endpoints for custom integrations, and 3D silo visualization views.

Phase 5. Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps

The platform was deployed on Google Cloud, with the DevOps engineer configuring containerized services, automated deployment pipelines, and monitoring infrastructure. The cloud architecture was designed to support the client’s deployment model: some facilities operate in fully cloud connected mode (data flows through the MQTT broker to Google Cloud, accessible via web and mobile), while others run in a hybrid mode where the Electron desktop application operates locally with periodic cloud synchronization.

This hybrid architecture was a nonnegotiable requirement. Many silo facilities are in rural locations with unreliable internet connectivity. The platform needed to function fully offline at the facility level while synchronizing data to the cloud when connectivity was available.

With FSM operational, the following capabilities replaced the manual processes:

Results

Measured over the first 12 months of the full engagement:

Post Harvest Loss Reduction

Estimated 15–20% annual reduction in grain spoilage losses

Operational Cost Savings

Up to 30% reduction compared to traditional on premise monitoring

Platform Coverage

Web, desktop, and mobile apps serving 300+ silo installations worldwide

Time to Market

MVP delivered and validated within 8 weeks; full platform live in under 3 months

Multi Site Management

Single interface managing temperature, humidity, CO₂, and inventory across distributed facilities

The global grain storage monitoring market was valued at USD 1.346 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 1.689 billion by 2032, growing at a 3.7% CAGR.

The client’s decision to invest in a cloud native software platform positions them to capture an increasing share of this market as silo operators transition from hardware only monitoring to integrated hardware software solutions.

Technologies and Tools

Frontend: React (web application), Electron.js (desktop application)
Mobile: Flutter (iOS and Android)
Backend: Node.js, MQTT broker integration
Database: MongoDB
Cloud: Google Cloud Platform
IoT Protocol: MQTT (sensor telemetry, fan control commands, alarm event publishing)
DevOps: Containerized deployment, CI/CD pipelines, cloud monitoring

Ongoing Engagement

Clixlogix continues to work with the client on the next generation of their grain management platform. Current development areas include integration of 3D visualization platforms for granary management, providing spatial grain condition mapping that goes beyond flat sensor arrays.

The team is also building cloud based software solutions to support the client’s expansion into new geographic markets, AI powered predictive analytics for grain quality maintenance that will use historical telemetry patterns to forecast spoilage risk before sensor thresholds are breached, and sustainable storage technologies focused on reducing energy consumption in automated ventilation systems.

Services Delivered

Emerging Technologies (IoT), Mobile App Development, Web Development, DevOps

Team Composition

Solution Architect, Project Manager, Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers, Mobile Engineers, Desktop Engineers, IoT / Embedded Engineers, DevOps Engineers, QA Engineers

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