Benjamin Gin

From siloed use of R to a Community with IT support

Fonterra is a large company and it is inevitable that tools get used in isolation. In about 2012 a small group of individuals progressively built up internal R packages then saw the potential to share these with the rest of Fonterra, via a CRAN-like repository that we like to call "FRAN". The installation of R working behind a corporate proxy was also difficult, and this small group of individuals figured out the configurations and then worked with IT to package R to be deployed through the company Software Centre.

That same small group of individuals then started building Shiny apps and showcased this to an upcoming project team who then utilised these individulas as embedded resources to help build and deploy apps to a Shiny Server Pro server. Out of the business value built, the Digital Platform Team was formed under IT to support this work. This was a journey that started in 2012 to the formation of the Digital Platform Team in 2023.

With the Fonterra IT direction to use Microsoft Azure Web Apps (as opposed to a Posit Connect server), existing Shiny apps now need to be migrated and any new apps are built into Containers to run as Azure Web Apps. Shiny apps are developed on a local development environment, and then Dockerised to build Containers that are then deployed as Azure web Apps. Care needs to be taken to ensure that Shiny Apps are written in such a way that they are isolated for a user, and can be accessed concurrently by multiple users. Shiny Cannon and Shiny Load Test are used to test concurrent usage.

The Digital Platform team also provides an in-house R training course as well as maintains and develops internal R packages (with input from a wider Fonterra R network).