Over 2 million people drink New Zealand Dairy Food's Anchor milk or Primo flavoured milk everyday. The trip home from the supermarket trolley to your cornflakes bowl is the easy part, but for the dairy giant, behind the scenes, disparate accounting systems and databases were hindering the company.

Expensive to maintain, temperamental and requiring a full time employee for monitoring, it was unable to meet New Zealand Dairy Foods' goals of delivering to its highest customer expectations. In milk talk, the best before date on their software had been well and truly reached.

"We wanted to trade electronically with our key customers Progressive Enterprises and Foodstuffs," says CIO Peter Scott. "So we needed an e-commerce platform that would enable us to talk to our two trading partners instantly; one that would be resilient, highly available and guarantee delivery of the many business documents which make up our order and delivery chain.

We also knew such a decision would ultimately save significant money for our customers as well as New Zealand Dairy Foods."

Microsoft Biztalk was the Anchor
The company needed to bring a large number of disparate accounting and ordering systems and databases onto one common ground.

To solve this issue Intergen utilised Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 as an electronic data interchange with EDI, and XML, interfacing with the JD Edwards ERP system.

Intergen's Paul Quirk believes that the BizTalk 2004 interface with JD Edwards is likely a NZ first.

The result is flexibility and interoperability between New Zealand Dairy Foods and Foodstuffs, Progressive and also Restaurant Brands (Starbucks), regardless of their choice of application, platform, or transport.

Microsoft BizTalk 2004 binds all the systems together controlling the entire process for New Zealand Dairy Foods, from purchase order receipt to shipping notices, invoicing, through to financial updates and inventory control.

A Primo effort
"We knew Intergen were leading the field in BizTalk work, and when a proof of concept showed us what we could be saving through this very smart platform, we hit the green light. Throughout the whole process they proved they were very adaptable, and technically excellent" says Scott.

The business difference
Aside from phoning and faxing a million order lines a month of Anchor and Primo milk, Fresh 'n' Fruity yoghurt, Puhoi cheeses and other leading brands, what has BizTalk achieved down in the real world - at the supermarket door?

"Point blank, we are saving money for our key customers," says Scott. "For example Foodstuffs Wellington has three branches and we electronically send invoices into one central point. Straight away that's cost and time savings."

Cost reductions are even clearer at New Zealand Dairy Foods. Previously it paid up to $30,000 a month in printing invoices alone. Now working electronically, errors are reduced, and invoices are processed more accurately and efficiently, requiring fewer resources.

In addition to accelerating their whole business process and collapsing the cost of doing business, New Zealand Dairy Foods believe BizTalk will now give them the ability to talk to smaller customers and grow new relationships.

"We have had a straight cash payback on this project," says Scott. "Our return on investment in this project is 100%".

They'll no doubt drink (a glass of milk) to that.

For more information about this case study contact
Shaun Donaghey at Intergen
09 966 3072
shaun.donaghey@intergen.co.nz
www.intergen.co.nz

September 2004