TKXS
Data-Driven Innovation

Thad Armbruster’s and Jack Ross’ collaboration, along with their business partners, demonstrates the brilliance of creative pairs.

Twenty years ago, as a founder at XSInc, Armbruster met diverse data-driven challenges by focusing on data collection, cleaning, integration, analysis, and online reporting primarily for the agriculture and turf & ornamental industries. At the same time, Ross co-founded Technekes to provide turnkey data management, marketing execution, and technologies that deliver sales, with one goal in mind: to create demand for their customers. In the past year, noting similarities in their cultures, size, and customer base, the two merged their companies to form a complementary partnership in TKXS, LLC. The know-how of agricultural practice, technology use, and unique problem-solving approach of Armbruster’s team were married to Ross’ team’s ability to create demand and realize a profitable ROI for TKXS’ customers.

Companies in today’s agriculture space are leveraging data analytics and data-driven marketing to glean real-time insights to adjust marketing and sales operations to be more productive and efficient. Combining the best of both worlds, TKXS provides products and services that act as the “Brains Behind the Data” for agriculture supply chains by adding intelligence, extracting and analyzing data, sending out real-time insights, and creating demand for the products. Data-enabled marketing provides sophisticated levels of data analysis that leverage disparate sets of data and market intelligence.

TKXS delivers a suite of data-driven solutions. At the core, TKXS focuses on integrating and leveraging agriculture industry data. While the industry has morphed into a data-centric space, the sets of data collected from all levels of the demand chain—end users, retailers, distributors, and manufacturers— get stored in silos. “The disparate nature of data collected often leads to data challenges,” says Ross, Chief Technology Officer.

“With our extensive experience, the team at TKXS helps customers to stay ahead of the pack by reshaping their data so their marketing and communication departments can effectively use it,” mentions Armbruster, President and COO.

The TKXS team has uniquely combined data integration and analytics with data-enabled marketing and industry knowledge to develop major proprietary advancements in the market: EZTrak, for example. EZTrak is “market intelligence for agriculture chemicals”—a one-of-a-kind database of retailer-to-grower sales transactions for crop protection products. Offered in partnership with Kynetec, EZTrak is the sole provider of pricing and market share data in agriculture. The insights produced allow a customer to see market share, price fluctuations, competitive advances and retreats, and new product introduction status. The product delivers in-season crop protection product trends—such as pricing, volume, and product mix for products including herbicides, nematicides, insecticides, fungicides, and product growth regulators. EZTrak is used throughout the industry by distributors and manufacturers as a core part of their go-to-market strategies. “Along with our technical capabilities, our focus on customer service plays a large part in defining our place in the business,” Ross points out.

The team at TKXS helps clients stay ahead of the pack by reshaping their data so their marketing and communication departments can effectively use it

TKXS’ reputation, combined with a strong record of dedicated customer service, has already fueled significant growth. With a constant focus on innovation, the company is releasing updated versions of its product lines, with greater flexibility, scalability, and capability to deliver solutions faster and better. “We see an ongoing opportunity for growth as TKXS reaches out to different industries, adjacencies, and geographies,” Armbruster concludes.