AI-Assisted Development Accelerates Delivery of a Self-Service Portal for Country Natural Beef

Summary

ScienceSoft built a self-service portal for a US agricultural cooperative, giving ranchers easy access to financial and operational insights. AI-assisted development helped the team complete selected tasks an estimated 1.5–8 times faster.

About Country Natural Beef

Country Natural Beef is a cooperative of family ranchers across the western US, producing premium natural beef and working to support the long-term future of ranching. For 40 years, it has focused on strong relationships, responsible land stewardship, and giving its members a voice in how the cooperative operates. Today, the cooperative brings together around 100 ranchers across nine states and manages 6.5 million acres of land. The company continuously improves its ranching practices to protect the land, support healthy livestock, and preserve family-based agriculture for future generations.

In the past, Country Natural Beef relied heavily on email to communicate payment and operational information to its member ranchers. The process was manual and prone to errors, including incorrect email addresses, omitted recipients, and reports prepared on an ad hoc basis.

Ranchers had no self-service access to information about their payments or livestock harvest results. Whenever they needed this data, they had to contact the cooperative’s employees, who manually compiled settlement sheets and sent them by email. This created additional administrative work and prevented cooperative members from accessing up-to-date information when they needed it.

Following a transition to a new management team, Country Natural Beef decided to modernize the way information was shared with the cooperative’s members. The company turned to ScienceSoft to develop a self-service portal that would automatically display relevant payment and harvest data from its existing systems.

Integrated Member Portal With Automated Data Delivery

ScienceSoft designed and developed a self-service web portal that gives ranchers on-demand access to financial and operational insights through dashboards, KPI summaries, charts, and structured data views. Hosted on AWS, the portal integrates with Country Natural Beef’s existing NetSuite and DataRails systems to automatically retrieve and present ranch, payment, and harvest information.

The portal includes the following sections:

• Dashboard — Presents a consolidated overview of key payment and operational information, including total payments, current head on feed, heads harvested, live cattle market data, and quick access to payments, announcements, events, and documents.
• Carcass Data — Lets ranchers review harvest performance through KPIs such as Choice or Better, grid percentage, average yield grade, average hot weight, and average payment per head. Users can view charts and detailed tables by lot and harvest date, filter information by fiscal period, ranch, and lot, and export records to Microsoft Excel.
• Payment Information — Displays payment KPIs such as year-to-date and upcoming payments, next payment date, revolving equity account, and future payments fund, along with a detailed payment schedule.
• Documents — Gives users access to ranch-specific and cooperative-wide documents organized into Governance, Compliance, Training, and Resources categories.
• Announcements and Events — Provides a centralized place to view important cooperative updates and scheduled activities.

The portal also includes an Admin Panel where authorized employees can manage member accounts, documents, announcements, and other portal content. Administrators can assign each member to one or multiple ranches, and the portal limits ranch-specific dashboards, documents, carcass records, and payment information accordingly. Users associated with multiple ranches can switch between or filter information for their authorized ranches.

AI-Assisted Development Accelerates Project Work

ScienceSoft used Claude and Claude Code across requirements analysis, solution design, coding, testing, and project reporting.

To keep AI-driven work aligned across requirements management, UI design, and architecting, the team followed ScienceSoft’s Human-Led Design and Specification-Driven practices. ScienceSoft also used reusable AI Skills — structured instruction files that guided Claude Code through recurring tasks and helped it follow project-specific rules, standards, and workflows. Instead of letting AI make implicit implementation decisions, the team first defined the intended design and acceptance criteria, then let Claude Code drive implementation while specialists reviewed plans, validated outputs, and corrected the AI where needed.

For requirements work, the business analyst provided Claude Code with business context from client calls, notes, and other project inputs. The tool helped generate the feature backlog, user stories, acceptance criteria, and Confluence documentation while the business analyst reviewed and adjusted all generated requirements before they were shared with Country Natural Beef for review.

AI assistance continued into design and development. The designer used Claude to speed up the creation of design concepts, reusable components, design primitives, and themes. Developers provided Claude Code with the approved requirements from Jira and Confluence. The tool prepared implementation specifications and plans, which developers reviewed before implementation, and then generated code for the approved functionality. Developers also used Claude for repeated code reviews and corrections during implementation.

Claude Code also supported end-to-end functional testing at the UI level. It generated Playwright scripts, opened completed features in a browser, walked through user flows, and compared the implemented interface against the approved design. These checks ran automatically before every feature commit, with the development team remaining responsible for reviewing both the results and the generated test code.

In project management, Claude was used to automate routine reporting and project documentation. For example, Claude could compile client reports for a specified date and update the relevant user stories when requirements changed. The project manager reviewed the generated results, freeing more time for client communication and critical project decisions.

As a result, the AI-supported approach helped reduce routine work across the team and make delivery faster and more predictable. The team could respond to Country Natural Beef’s feedback and demonstrate requested changes sooner while keeping requirements, design, and implementation synchronized

Based on the team’s estimates, selected AI-assisted activities were completed approximately 1.5–8x faster than with conventional workflows, depending on the task.

Key Outcomes for Country Natural Beef

• Self-service access for ranchers to their payment and harvest information. Country Natural Beef’s ranchers can now log in to the portal and independently access payment and harvest data, documents, announcements, and events relevant to their ranches without requesting the information from cooperative staff.
• Less manual reporting and member support. Operational and financial data is pulled automatically from Country Natural Beef’s existing systems, so staff no longer need to compile and email settlement information each time a member asks for it.
• Fewer information-sharing errors. Moving member information out of one-off email distribution reduced the risk of missed recipients, incorrect email addresses, and other errors associated with the manual process.
• Controlled access to ranch data. Members see information only for the ranches they are authorized to access, while users associated with several ranches can switch between them as needed.
• Easier analysis of harvest performance. Ranchers can review carcass results by lot, harvest date, ranch, and fiscal period, use KPIs and charts to assess performance, and export detailed records for further analysis.

Following the portal’s successful delivery, Country Natural Beef continued working with ScienceSoft for on-demand support and began discussing further enhancements to the portal.

Technologies and Tools

AWS, React, TypeScript, .NET, PostgreSQL, Recharts, NetSuite, DataRails, Claude, Claude Code.