The Company
Pacific Seeds have been providing a wide range of seed and seed technology solutions in Australia for 50 years. With a steadily growing business, Pacific Seeds identified that they could increase business efficiency by improving their trading processes.
The Issues
- Pacific Seeds recognized that automating tasks like order & data entry, and integrating with their accounting systems would save considerable time and resources.
- Order confirmations and invoices were manually generated and distributed, increasing the risk of error and inaccuracy, leading to delay and unnecessary customer service issues.
- Existing systems and processes were sometimes overloaded at peak times with a negative impact on customer service.
- The customer service team were frequently over stretched, resulting in unnecessary employee stress, higher error rates and additional staff requirements
The Solution
F4F Agriculture recommended that Pacific Seeds should install the F4F Adapter software to link the back office system to the F4F Community. The Adapter software enables a number of Software as a Service (SaaS) functions such as translation of documents, data validation and security through PKI encryption. The software also provides a guarantee, using message broker technology, that documents will be delivered to trading partners once. To provide full visibility of the electronic process, F4F Agriculture provided Pacific Seeds with access to their message tracking and reporting applications which provide real-time information about the status of all documents sent and received.
The project lasted approximately 6 weeks, and the business benefits were realised immediately after launch.
80% of Pacific Seeds orders are now processed through F4F. Since becoming a member of the F4F Community, Pacific Seeds have managed to reduce their document processing time by 50%. Errors, and the complexities involved with handling different customer order formats, have been largely eradicated. In the very rare cases where errors arise, they are often resolved in "under 40 seconds".
Testimonial
Pacific Seeds is a very seasonal business. When it rains we receive extremely high amounts of orders via EDI. It is imperative that our processes allow the team to do their job in these peak times without undue stress and unnecessary extra time required to do the job. F4F EDI has allowed this to happen without additional resources being added to the team. We have been able to eliminate the majority of errors that occurred in the manual processes.
