Our Story
The Journey Begins
Tronia's humble beginning started in 1986 when founder Ron Laird, alongside his father Larry Laird, had a vision to evolve the family ag retail business. With a newly acquired degree in computer technology, a passion for agri-business, and years of crop inputs management experience, Ron began a project to digitize the calculation of fertilizer blending. That project turned into a lifelong journey dedicated to empowering independent ag retailers in all areas of business management solutions.
Tronia Is Born
Tronia Systems Ltd. – the company – is born. Formally incorporated on August 17th, 1992, this significant date in our history symbolizes the beginning of what will become a 3-decade long commitment to innovation and growth within the Canadian ag retail industry.
Pioneers of Innovation
As the internet begins to revolutionize how the world interacts and does business, Tronia launches a fully hosted version of its legacy ERP application, Edge. Offering SaaS technology that effectively removed all of the technical complexities of running and maintaining an on-premise ERP application, Tronia is one of the first software providers in the ag space to give users the ability to work 'anytime, anywhere'. This monumental change enabled retail operators to focus all of their time and energy on making their businesses successful.
The agrē Revolution
With a forward vision and over 3 years of painstaking development, Tronia launched a fully redeveloped ag management platform — the agrē Solution. This marked the beginning of a new era for Tronia, our existing retail customers, and the numerous partnerships that would eventually be formed. Tronia's new offering would shape the landscape of ag retail ERP.
Expanding Our Horizons
The need to expand, automate, and integrate was becoming the clear path of the future. Tronia worked in partnership with its retail clients to develop and roll out comprehensive modules and integration options in the areas of agronomy, grower portals, automated blender and scale integrations functionality. Over the course of the next few years, Tronia would also embark on an extensive project to fully design and develop a custom grain management module to add to the growing line-up of business solutions.
The Fire
There is no greater show of resilience than to experience a catastrophe and rise above. In July of 2018, Tronia's office building was struck by lightning. With the ensuing fire and water damage, the entire building was badly damaged. Many of our clients may not even be aware of this event because we did not pause operations or experience any interruptions. Service to our ag retailers continued because of our solid disaster recovery planning (DRP) and the determination of our amazing team — allowing us to navigate a disaster and continue to forge ahead. After a significant rebuild project, our team moved back 'home' in 2019, nearly 1 year later.
Adversity Breeds Progress
Our world was forever changed with the Covid-19 pandemic. This global crisis offered Tronia a unique opportunity to work alongside our customers and partners as we all attempted to navigate this unknown territory. Together we began to reimagine what ag retail as a business could look like moving forward and identified how grower engagement and digital tools would be key to strengthening customer relationships. Several projects to enhance our solutions in the areas of eConfirmation, mobile applications, portal solutions, and API development began to take shape and will continue to influence our roadmap into the future.