Blending technical savvy and sharing information

“You can’t scale chaos,” says BinSentry’s senior manager of fulfillment.

To accommodate BinSentry’s astronomical growth, the company’s field technician contingent has more than doubled in the past two years. Now 61 employees strong, members have a vital role: after the sales team secure the customers, technicians must make sure the technology is installed and working properly, delivering the promised results.

They’re succeeding. Adhering to standardized operating practices, they’ve installed 55,000 devices in the US, Canada and Brazil, with 99 per cent customer retention. 

That’s a well-oiled machine, one that runs on consistency across the board. Basil Obasi, the company’s senior manager of fulfilment, attributes the team’s near-flawless performance to methodically blending technical savvy and sharing information, all the way from personal connectivity with employees to the internal newsletter he periodically produces himself for his staff. 

His goal is to make the team run smoothly and flawlessly.

“You can’t scale chaos,” says Basil, team leader since 2024. “You can only scale what you can standardize, and you can’t standardize operations without excellent communications. Keeping information to yourself is not good for anyone.”

To Basil, precision management is a learned skill – just like farming. He was introduced to feed grain as a youngster, tending to the chickens that pecked around his family’s hobby farm near Lagos, Nigeria. 

But even though his professional world now revolves around steel grain-storage bins, he’d never laid his eyes on them in person until he moved to Canada in 2022. 

“In Nigeria, feed is stored in bags,” he says. “That’s how I fed chickens. Steel bins for feed grain storage was astonishing, foreign to me.”

Steel bins -- which Basil’s become familiar with first-hand, have scaled 50 or so of the structures with BinSentry -- are certainly superior to feed bags. But they too come with their share of problems – most notably, inventory management challenges caused by the inherent lack of visibility inside the bin. BinSentry addresses that challenge through its patented ProSense FEED sensory technology that replaces manual inventory measurement with automated, high-resolution 3D imaging and AI-powered accuracy. 

Basil, who resides in Ontario with his wife Eunice, likes BinSentry’s fast-paced environment. He calls it trouble shooting, which is central to his background, let alone his nature. After graduating with his computer science degree in Nigeria, Basil worked as a software engineer, a web development manager and an IT product manager, in his home country and in the UK. He still likes setting up websites for fun, such as a recent site he collaborated on with a partner for Black History Month. 

In 2022, Basil he was employed by a government agency that he remembers as highly operational and standardized work…but lacking urgency. That all changed when he joined BinSentry, as operations specialist. In 2024, he went on to his new role, hiring dedicated, talented employees with a penchant for communications and implementing management procedures that would ensure smooth growth. 

“We are a data-driven company,” he says. “We set up processes and we standardize everything. We always have to think ahead, set-up expectations and anticipate something that may never even have happened yet.”

Basil likes BinSentry’s spirit, and its role as a significant cog in the feed grain sector. Feed grains are cost-effective, packed with nutrients and can be adapted to each farm’s management strategy. Feed grains are fundamental to economies around the world, serving as the primary energy source for livestock and underpinning the modern food and feed system.

“Our mission, to serve the feed grain industry, is so vital,” says Basil. “Everyone needs farmers because everyone needs to eat, and we’re here to support farmers. Our team is full of A-players who want to work with other A-players to fulfill our mission.”       

Owen Roberts is a Guelph-based agricultural journalist and a past-president of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists.