Rural Industry

[admin]

Farming, Regional Australia and New Zealand, and environmental news.

[admin]

AustralianIT | Mahesh Sharma | June 02, 2009

GRAINCORP is on the verge of completing a $10 million supply chain overhaul that includes the installation of a new SAP system and the re-engineering of 80 per cent of the company's business processes.

Project Storm is due to be completed early next month and will replace a 15-year-old system developed in-house by the grain storage and handling company.

Graincorp has already re-engineered various processes in the early stages of the two-year project, which have enabled workflow functions to be performed remotely and in real time.

The $10 million project will overhaul 237 business processes at Graincorp and deliver a return on investment of 15 per cent a year, according to CIO Glenn Mason. "We want to actually have the best storage and logistics management systems in our sector," Mr Mason said.

"We believe Storm will have that.

"It really opens up the mobility equation for our workforce which is distributed across a large geographical area."

Mr Mason said other functions on the mobility platform would include approvals for annual leave, sick leave and procurement and managed workflows "from an HR perspective".

Graincorp planned other features including radio frequent identification wagon tagging, digital signatures, and SMS and email notification to customers confirming transactions, he said.

At the heart of Project Storm is the replacement of six legacy systems developed in-house over 15 years ago with SAP back-office technology and a front-end based on Microsoft's .net platform.

Mr Mason said Graincorp was performing the end-to-end testing of the new system, which was expected to go live in early July.

Graincorp was already using SAP for functions such as payroll and human resources but would expand this to all back-office systems including customer relationship management and grower inventory.

It has used Microsoft Sharepoint to develop a new online front-end platform that can be accessed by growers and buyers, Graincorp's core business.

"We worked with Extend Technologies to develop a best of both worlds solution with the robust processing capability of SAP and the flexibility of a customised front-end based around the .net solution.

"The Microsoft front-end basically enables us to operate the business even in the case of a telecommunications failure.

"It's similar to how a retail business can run their cash registers even if the link back to the head office is down."

One of the early stages of Project Storm was to upgrade Graincorp's telecommunications infrastructure a year ago from a network delivered over a dial-up connection to Telstra's NextG wireless technology.

Mr Mason said the upgrade cut the time to email a document or invoice information from 20 minutes to 20 seconds.

Graincorp was also able to provision temporary offices in a matter of days, a process that previously took three weeks, Mr Mason said.

[admin]

iTWire, Peter Dinham, Tuesday, 06 October 2009

Australia’s largest dairy company, Murray Goulburn Co-operative (MGC), has implemented a SAP ERP solution to transform its loan management systems, which MGC says has increased data clarity, accuracy and transparency, and allowed it to increase the opportunities to offer finance to Australian dairy farmers.

SAP says the implementation was completed in three months with the support of its special expertise partner, IZAZI Solutions.

MGC’s manager industry and government affairs, Robert Poole, said today the company has very close relationships with its members, and was in a unique position to support them with short term funding.

Poole said that the company offers its members low interest and flexible loan options, with loans repaid by the proceeds from the member’s future milk production, and that the new software from SAP and IZAZI had “improved reporting capabilities and audit processes, and increased the funding opportunities that we can offer to members.”

Previously MGC was using tools that had been developed in-house, databases and spread sheets for loans management, and Poole said the new software supports a more rigorous and rigid approval process for loans, in line with current regulatory requirements.

According to Poole, MGC plans to roll out an electronic loan application form for farmers in Victoria before the end of this year, and he added, “this Web based loan form will increase the accuracy of data capture from new applicants. Approximately 30 regional field officers will be utilising the Web-based application form, servicing about 2,600 farmers.”

Poole said the implementation was very quick.

“IZAZI had a good team and were very productive – they demonstrated to us that they were up to the task. This has been a wise investment for us, especially given the recent economic situation. International prices for dairy products such as milk powders, cheese and butters fell dramatically as a result of the GFC.

“Consequently, farmgate returns fell sharply. These factors combined with the recent dry seasons in some parts of Australia resulted in increased demand from suppliers for short-term finance and it was important that the software tools were in place to support the increased demand.”

MGC is currently using SAP financials, procurement, sales & distribution, production planning, plant maintenance and HR/ payroll modules of SAP ERP 6.0, and is looking to implement SAP business intelligence software in the near future.

[admin]

PDFs tidy sugar research data
Jennifer Foreshew From: The Australian November 10, 2009 11:35AM


WITH nearly 60 years worth of reports documenting technology in the sugar industry, researchers could spend hours trying to locate relevant information.

The Sugar Research and Innovation Group wanted to help sugar milling companies and academic researchers access historic information for decision-making on the future of the industry.

The group was formed in 2005 at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and has about 15 researchers

Its origins were in Sugar Research Ltd, formed in 1949 by Australian sugar mills, and it now trades as the Sugar Research Institute.

There are 25 sugar mills in Australia and the group works with all of them. Its specialist capabilities are in sugarcane milling, power generation, sugar refining and sugar chemistry.

The group needed to sort and cull a lot of industry material, which included physical reports.



The documents were stored in an offsite facility, and researchers had difficulty accessing them.

"It was a couple of hours to grab a document, which wasn't really satisfactory, plus they were all in boxes and filing cabinets and things in this little storeroom," said Geoff Kent, a principal research fellow with the group at QUT.

Associate Professor Kent said the group had an electronic document library, but a lot of the early documents in it were not complete.

"So when we moved to Brisbane we went through all of the originals of our reports that we still had and we wanted to get them scanned, but also make them text-searchable." A large scanning project, conducted by Scan Conversion Services, for the group on behalf of the Sugar Research Institute was completed in September last year.

Scanning more than 110,000 pages and images, and capturing more than 300,000 characters of database information added a valuable source of historical data to the institute's library.

"We already had an electronic library that we call the e-library, which a group at QUT put together three or four years ago," Professor Kent said. "We have ported all of our existing electronic documents into it. "

SCS produced PDFs of all the group's reports going back to the early 1950s.

Professor Kent said mills were always upgrading their equipment and changing the way they did things and would consult the group to help them with changes.

"When you start a project you need to know what has happened before, otherwise you end up reinventing the wheel," Professor Kent said.

"The SRI library is probably the best reference collection we have for sugar industry work."

SCS provided DVDs of PDFs and an Excel spreadsheet that contained a lot of the catalogue data, such as report title, report authors and publication year.

"We then imported that information directly into our e-library," Professor Kent said.

"So from our point of view it was a relatively painless process."

All of the SRI's reports from 1950 to 2009 are available electronically.



Case Study: SRI

The problem: Difficulty sourcing relevant material from almost 60 years of historical data.

The process: Scan Conversion Services was brought in for a large-scale project to scan more than 110,000 pages and images and capture more than 300,000 characters of information.

The result: A valuable source of historical data has been added to the SRI library, providing fast online access for sugar milling companies and academic researchers.

[admin]

Rust Report

Queensland-based developer Polymorphic Solutions has been selected to provide its ChilliDB CRM application to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. The authority is responsible for planning integrated management of the water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin and is a crucial element of the Federal Government's Water for the Future Program.

Mark Smith, technical director of Polymorphic, said ChilliDB will be made available to the agency's 260 staff through a SaaS model. "As an organisation that is growing quickly, MDBA needed a CRM that could both manage its current stakeholder data securely and easily accommodate new data requirements in the future," Smith said. www.polymorphicsolutions.com.au

[admin]

Rust Report

The Victorian Country Fire Authority has deployed an SAP CRM system to support its new Community Meetings project. The project was implemented by Fujitsu Australia. www.fujitsu.com.au

[admin]

InsideSAP. December 01, 2009

The Country Fire Authority (CFA) has announced it will use SAP CRM software for an initiative aimed at saving lives this bushfire season.

The Community Meetings CRM Project will improve the effectiveness of the CFA in managing the community in the event of a natural disaster.

With the CRM system, implemented by Fujitsu, the CFA can provide both better education and a more timely decision making process.

Michael Foreshew, CIO for the CFA, explains what the system will do.

“The SAP system enables CFA staff to communicate with citizens and provides an infrastructure for the transfer of crucial information and updates during emergency situations,” Foreshew said.

“Over the last few months and ongoing, we are gathering residents’ contact details and demographics, so that we know where people live and who they are, which has allowed us to create a risk profile on all residents on the new system.”

The solution also allows the CFA to proactively contact residents to provide important information and fire risk updates.

The solution has been incorporated with a series of Community Safety Meetings, which are a key forum for CFA to educate and inform Victorian communities and townships about emergencies and appropriate responses to them.

Once residents have been registered in the system, they can access a range of additional information an to help them get

“Residents can now log onto our website and book themselves into one of the meetings taking place in their local area, so that they can register their details,” Foreshew said.

“The meetings provide an opportunity for residents to register their details and include fire management training – a program called Community Fireguard. The initiative will ensure that Victorians are better prepared for emergency situations,” he continued.

More than 100 community meetings will take place across the state.

The CFA has applauded Fujitsu for their understanding of the outcomes the organisation wanted to achieve.

“A CRM solution for an emergency services organisation is a very new concept. Fujitsu demonstrated their ability to identify the key points and requirements then built the solution around that understanding,” Foreshew said.

In the aftermath of the 2009 Black Sa****ay bushfire disaster, and in anticipation of the upcoming bushfire season, the Victorian Government provided funding for the project to the CFA to upgrade its infrastructure, critical assets and tools with which to deliver an improved service to Victorian regional communities.

The Black Sa****ay bushfires in February this year were the most catastrophic Australian Fires on record, destroying 450,000 hectares of land, and killing 173 people.