Largest grain business in UK find Wintouch the perfect fit!

 

Our Business and Existing Situation

Centaur Grain Limited
We are a farmer-owned grain marketing business with bases in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Wiltshire. Annually we market well in excess of 1 million tonnes of combinable crops. That makes us the largest committed grain business in the UK.

We have also developed long-terms contracts to supply key consumers in the food industry, including household brand names.

Centaur aspires to be the grain marketing company of choice, adding value through innovation, service, knowledge and shared commitment.

IT
Our core business platform is an IBM iSeries server. This hosts an integrated system consisting of ledgers and a bespoke Grain Marketing solution, provided for us by Kingfisher Associates (UK) Ltd., an IBM Business Partner.

Our IT infrastructure links our 5 regional offices, and provides remote access to systems for our Farm Service Managers.

Why we needed to do something

UK farming is subject to powerful and volatile market forces. In that environment we recognised that more was needed to protect the interests of the over 2,000 farmers who make up and collectively own Centaur. We identified the following important issues that needed to be addressed.

Marketing
In our rapidly changing environment, we are constantly identifying new opportunities and markets for our farmers. We need to ensure these are being communicated effectively, which includes tracking distribution of information and measuring response.

Service Levels
Centaur has an unparalleled reputation in the industry for service, both to farmers and consumers. But high standards do not create or maintain themselves. We recognised the ability to measure service was essential in maintaining those levels and in delivering improvements. This would enable us to retain customers and grow the business in the future.

Turn Abundant Data Into Information
Our existing systems were designed to process and capture vast amounts of data. We faced the challenge of turning all of that data into information – making it available in a format useable by customer-facing end-users rather than IT specialists, so business managers could make informed and timely decisions.

Avoid Fragmentation of Data
The expansion of our business across 5 regional offices introduced the risk of data fragmentation. We saw the need to ensure that customer management data was collected centrally, rather than allowing it to fragment across local and individual systems.

These key business needs combined to show us we needed a means of managing our customer base – a CRM solution.

Our Journey

Senior management went through a process to find a solution that addressed these issues. Various options were considered, including re-engineering our systems from scratch. We looked at various CRM and Web solutions, including industry leading brand names. In the end we came into contact with John Phelan (Caliber), who told us all about Wintouch.

Through a series of meetings we imparted to John and his team our CRM requirements. They showed us comprehensively how Wintouch could meet those needs. They arranged Web-based demonstration sessions where we could see the application prototyped over our own data. This gave us the confidence that our needs could indeed be met.

Why We Chose Wintouch

Wintouch provided a solution that was perfect for us.

The application was able to use live data from our existing systems. Other solutions would have entailed implementing separate, Windows-based systems for their application, and creating copies of our data. That would have meant the data used by the CRM solution would no longer be live; interfaces between systems would be needed, increasing processing overhead and creating an area of cost and risk; additional hardware and software licenses would have been required. Wintouch avoided all of these risks and costs, both direct and indirect.

Implementing Wintouch

Once we agreed to go ahead, work began quickly. Using powerful software tools, Touchtone in the USA were able to build our solution. When the time came to deploy it, both they and Caliber provided on-site presence, working in conjunction with us and with our existing software providers.

The Benefits of Wintouch

• Everyone uses the same up-to-date information
• Wintouch Activities capture customer contact information and make it available to all users of the system
• The Wintouch groups and reporting combine to make data extraction to Excel and other applications straightforward and easy to use
• Our Farm Service Team contains a wide range of levels of IT knowledge and expertise, yet all are comfortable with the system and use it daily

 

The Future

The capabilities of Wintouch leave ample room for future development. Our next goals are to automate processes using the workflow and e-mail integration capabilities of Wintouch.