Background

AgCentral is a privately owned company providing farm procurement services to the agricultural industry. AgCentral act as a market intermediary between farmers and suppliers of chemicals and other farm inputs, to provide a cost effective aggregated purchasing and supply service.

AgCentral was founded by Johnny Kahlbetzer, an agricultural icon with extensive experience in dryland and irrigated farming. Prior to his involvement with AgCentral, Johnny was operations director of the Twynam Group for the past 10 years.

Business Challenge

AgCentral had an existing offline business model, but their business was unable to scale without a significant increase in the number of staff. The processes for planning, pricing, sourcing and delivering chemical product to a geographically dispersed client base were extremely complex, and labour intensive.

AgCentral faced the ongoing challenge of manually managing the process of forward demand forecasting for each of their clients and ensuring that sufficient supply would be in place. Additionally, logistics issues such as management of delivery and stock tracking across disparate geographical locations was compounded by the fact that none of the operational elements had any integration with the AgCentral financials system.

AgCentral recognised that by harnessing web-based technologies for the logistics, pricing, business management and communications aspects of their operations, they would be able to scale their business to meet market demand.

The Strategy

To develop a system that would deliver both pricing and operational benefits throughout the supply chain: to AgCentral, their clients, and to their supply chain partners. It was particularly important that the solution allow AgCentral to scale up their operations as needed during peak seasonal periods.

The Solution

Bullseye developed an e-procurement system that provides a web-based application for the management of the entire AgCentral operation. Some of the elements that comprise the system include:

• Ability to develop new client relationships via the web. Clients can register, apply for credit and transact entirely on the site
• Complete e-enablement of all interactions between AgCentral and their clients; Clients are able to create tenders, get real-time pricing, place orders, and check the status of orders – all via a secure web-based interface
• Complete e-enablement of all interactions between AgCentral and their supply chain; Suppliers and carriers are notified electronically of orders, purchase orders are automatically faxed from the system, and supply chain partners are able to manage the status and location of stock and deliveries via a secure extranet
• Remote integration to the AgCentral financials system. All debtors, and creditors as and other financial transactions integrate directly into the Great Plains financials system. The system also provides automated customer credit management

Results

The site has been a huge success for AgCentral. It now forms the core around which all internal and external operations revolve.

During the first three months of operations, AgCentral have had outstanding results:

• They have quadrupled their client base without the need to employ any additional staff
• 95% of their new clients have registered online
• They have been able to increase their order throughput by a factor of 4
• They have developed a detailed view of their client demand patterns which will become the basis for future demand forecasting

Technology Used

The technology platform comprised a combination of industry-leading technologies:

Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2000
General Ledger System: Microsoft Great Plains
Application/Web Server: Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0
Fax Server: System Solutions MESSAGEmanager

The system operates in a fully redundant web farm environment utilising 4 separate servers, and employs hardware load balancing to deliver scalability.

All data marshalling in the application was achieved through extensive use of XML on both client and server. This allowed a particularly functional and rich user interface, and paid heed to the bandwidth requirements of the users.

The system also makes widespread use of SMTP and FTP mechanisms to integrate across disparate external environments.