All things agricultural
For over 150 years Elders has been providing a wide range of agricultural services to the rural community of Australia. A “one-stop” shop for farmers, Elders’ services include merchandise, financing, insurance, real estate and sales.

With over 400 locations, 85,000 product offerings, 1,600 suppliers, 100,000 clients and a sales staff of 1,000, Elders has traditionally generated an enormous amount of paperwork exporting cattle and other agricultural products. “We are a very transaction-oriented company,” says Chris Ferguson, IT General Manager for Elders. “We have a large back office, with over 1.2 million merchandise invoices going through the system in one year.”

Eliminating supply chain kinks
The company’s Supply Management division focuses on facilitating the sales process to develop supply channels between suppliers and several agricultural markets overseas. That meant processing over 500 faxes a day.

IBM services, software and hardware
IGS played an integral role in implementation. According to Ferguson, they supplied the resources needed to develop the automation application, while BIS offered the strategy and process consulting to create the comprehensive, end-to-end SCM solution.

Included in the package were IBM WebSphere Application Server and Visual Age for Java, which provided a rich, e-business application deployment environment.

MQSeries software supported Elders’ heterogeneous computing environment, enabling any-to-any connectivity and inter-process communications between system components that reside on multiple platforms. “We had to ensure interoperability because our sales people and our suppliers work on a large variety of platforms,” Ferguson explains. “We also used standards-based technologies — including XML — wherever possible, to ensure that we will be able to support new suppliers and business requirements in the future.”

Other elements of the solution included Microsoft BizTalk, which served as the Internet e-commerce gateway for supporting secure document transaction between Elders and their suppliers, and as a mapping tool to transform suppliers’ business documents to Elders business documents and vice versa; and the IBM eserver, eSeries server, which offers Elders reliable, intelligent integration that stores all business data.

New platform launches big savings
Since implementation, Elders has experienced a 70% productivity improvement in accounts payable, a 70% reduction in manual paperwork and a significantly decreased rate of error. “We are achieving a very rapid return on our investment with IBM,” says Ferguson. “It should pay for itself completely through increases in productivity in less than a year, with additional benefits for our customers and suppliers in improved lead times and increased accuracy.”

Suppliers feel the benefitsOn the suppliers’ side, the need for manual input of orders has been virtually eliminated, saving them time and improving efficiency. Overall, the success of Elders’ B2B solution has sparked a high level of interest among numerous other suppliers in the field. “They all want to join our B2B platform,” says Ferguson.

As Elders rolls out the solution to its second stage, they plan on cataloging all suppliers electronically. “We plan on taking the e-business platform to the next level with a comprehensive database,” he says. “We’re looking forward to working with IBM on that project as well.”

For more information
To learn more about how IBM solutions can benefit your small to medium-size business, visit their website or phone 0800 801 800 .

January 2005