Australian Wheat Board

---

AWB's e-Business initiatives improve online services for wheat growers

When AWB wanted to upgrade its Web site and improve the quality and breadth of online services available to its 36,000 wheat growers, it turned to Fujitsu.

Already a proven performer as AWB's IT infrastructure outsourcing partner, Fujitsu undertook an e-Business consulting project to establish future directions for AWB's Web requirements. Fujitsu's e-Business Consulting Framework is a proven, benefits-led methodology. It offers a step-by-step process to identify key business requirements and benefits, delivering a solution in manageable chunks with minimal disruption to the customer's business.

Fujitsu consultants worked closely with AWB to develop a portal service for online sales and marketing information through a personalised, community-based Web site, supported by an enterprise-wide content management system.

The new Web site will give farmers more immediate access to information about their accounts, commodity and stock market prices, detailed weather maps, regional news and more, 24 hours a day.

Fujitsu's e-Business Consultants worked to progress the project from design to build stage, delivering both the portal and content management systems in just two months. This stage of the project also included comprehensive technical evaluations of various products and platforms, resulting in a decision for the Microsoft .NET platform and the XML meta-language to facilitate data interchange.

When Fujitsu invited AWB to become the first customer of its new Solution Centre, AWB was keen to leverage the Centre's extensive resources and technical expertise to ensure the success of its e-Business project.

"Once we had identified the Microsoft .NET platform as our preferred direction, it was a natural progression to partner with the Fujitsu Microsoft Solution Centre to design, test and implement the new Web site," said AWB's e-Business Program Director, Kevin Delaney.

"By leveraging their know-how and state-of-the-art facilities, we have been able to expedite the project and will go live with the first stage of the new solution on August 22," he said.

As Australia's largest national grain marketing organisation, AWB supports wheat growers by marketing and financing their grain, and is responsible for the management and marketing of all export bulk wheat.

"This initiative gives us the opportunity in the future to consider e-commerce applications where wheat can be traded online and growers paid online. In fact there is the potential to link the entire supply chain, integrating silos, transport companies and international buyers " said Mr Delaney.

The new AWB site and its supporting infrastructure has been optimised for speed and performance since most growers access the Internet via a standard telephone line - in some areas, this means that the line speed is very poor. The new site will also incorporate 128 bit encryption to provide the same level of security as financial institutions for online transactions.

"The Fujitsu Microsoft Solution Centre has implemented an end-to-end solution that incorporates a broad range of Microsoft technologies. We believe the .NET platform will become one of the recognised standards for Web services," he said.

Consultants from the Solution Centre have been involved in the project from the beginning, providing design and back-end integration expertise while working closely with the site developer. Microsoft Australia personnel were also involved, leveraging the close relationship between the two companies to access additional specialist input as appropriate.

The Microsoft .NET platform has been integrated with AWB's legacy mainframe systems written in ADABAS Natural, but will need to be migrated again at the end of the year when AWB moves to an SAP solution.

"The Microsoft technology gives us the capability to integrate with almost any platform, offering state-of-the-art functionality while retaining our existing investment in legacy systems. The quality of expertise available through the Solution Centre also gives us confidence that any future developments will be able to be quickly integrated into the .NET platform to enable a single, end-to-end solution," said Mr Delaney.