F4F links agriculture worldwide

Automating the exchange of transactional documents is standard commercial practice in most industry sectors and will be fundamental to future business success in the food chain. Supermarkets deal with 95% of their suppliers using electronic document exchange or an online system. And vertical “industry led” exchanges like F4F have become integral to the workings of global business sectors like chemicals, steel, paper and mining. 

Core to F4F’s growth has been the trust that customers have in the robust and secure infrastructure, the ease of integration and the resulting cost-savings of a shared platform. Many of our customers were trading with one another prior to joining F4F, but their processes were often resource-hungry, slow and prone to human error. Integration with the F4F hub has brought significant gains in efficiency and cost reduction.

Broadening the F4F community 
Initially the F4F community was concentrated in the grain, feed and farm input supply sectors, predominantly seeds, fertiliser, agrochemicals and retail supplies like fencing, animal health, hardware supplies and clothing but the scope of businesses joining the community has expanded to include fuels, meat processing, laboratory testing, ports food manufacturing and many others. The adoption of inter-company electronic systems in the agri-food sector has been growing steadily,

 Where in the World

Across the globe, as the agricultural market-place contracts, multi-national agri-food businesses are expanding into new regions and countries and other businesses are merging and growing. F4F customers have quickly found that being part of the F4F community makes great business sense as regional offices and suppliers can operate with the same computer system. 

“Following F4F’s launch in 2000 we quickly realised that customers had common partners, processes and markets across the world so it was a natural progression to extend the community and

offer our services beyond the UK,” explains Neil Paton, F4F’s IT director.

Global launch 
“For example as an F4F member in the UK Toepfer can leverage the same process out of its head office in Hamburg with no additional IT effort. The same applies to multi-national agrochemical, fertiliser and grain trading companies operating on a pan-European or global scale.” In 2002 F4F Australia was formed along identical lines to the UK business, with a critical mass of the agricultural sector’s main participants and a mix of distribution companies and suppliers.

Mainland Europe was next, with France, Belgium and Holland in 2005 and Germany in 2007. F4F South Africa was also formed in 2007, establishing a similar community to the UK and Australian model. 

Efficiency savings
Of course, being able to securely trade and communicate across international borders is only part of the story. Customers also recognise the benefits in improvements in administrative efficiencies by integration of IT systems, web-based applications and business processes. As F4F extended its geographical reach, the F4F XML document standard was enhanced in line with business processes operated in those regions

Enhanced services  “As a result of our move into mainland Europe we increased the types of business documents we could support five-fold, embracing such things as international shipping and transport by rail and barge, as well as by road. We’ve also enhanced F4F services to comply with government legislation for electronic document exchange in those countries,” explains Neil.

New communities are successful because F4F always aims to establish a critical mass of participants within a market and its geographical area. The more businesses involved the greater the efficiencies. The electronic exchange of financial and logistical information eliminates manual processing, which in turn improves accuracy and removes processing and handling costs. 

Business value
He believes F4F’s success is down to customer confidence in the technology underpinning the operation and its unique business value. “The F4F trading hub exchanges millions of business documents each year and has increased efficiency dramatically for all trading partners involved,” says Neil.

F4F Australia was established in 2002 in response to strong demand from the Australian agricultural industry for B2B trading technology. The industry had been investigating options for some time, but costs had been prohibitive and systems unproven.

 Glen Andrews. Managing Director at F4F Australia

“Syngenta was already using F4F in the UK, and introduced the concept to the main drivers for the technology including Elders, Wesfarmers (now AWB Landmark), Incitec Pivot, Bayer CropScience, and NuFarm,” explains Glen Andrews, managing director at F4F Australia. “The main advantage was as an existing proven system, the F4F platform and process could be reused. The F4F UK process was thoroughly checked for compatibility 

 and our model was an excellent fit for the Australian agricultural industry.”  

The main sectors involved in F4F Australia include general agricultural merchants, agrochemicals, animal health and fertiliser. Technically the platform is identical to the UK but the Australian customer base is a little different. Both countries are strong in fertiliser and retail supplies but F4F UK is far more cereals, feed and protein focussed because of the mix of founding members. In Australia  the mix is weighted more towards agrochemical and animal health suppliers.  

The Sydney-based F4F team of eight work with many integrated manufacturers and the ten dominant major distributors. The team’s objective in 2008 is to develop the feed and grain trading side further. Glen sees process efficiency and supply chain management optimisation as the two main drivers in the Australian B2B community.  

The Australian agricultural market is looking healthier following some tough trading conditions in the past four years including a severe and well-documented drought. “In some ways it’s mirroring the UK industry; it’s a changing market with  a number of company mergers and acquisitions that only reinforce the need for further efficiencies within the supply chain. This is where F4F Australia can help” says Glen.

Yara Opts for F4F Hub 

The foundation project developed by F4F was a company-to-company B2B hub, but the functionality was quickly extended to replace the UK’s in-house ordering facility with a web-based capability that integrates with Yara’s SAP system to provide realtime account access and information to customers. More recently this web-based solution has also been extended from the UK into Yara Italy. 

“The F4F technology matched our own concepts and vision and this was our reason for selecting them as our prime integration service provider,” explains Juergen Boerger, Yara’s Service Manager. “In the UK for example the partnership works well because the team we deal with knows our business and our commercial expectations so well that we now feel that we all speak the same language.”

F4F technology
Commercially, the aim has been to maximise the number of orders and document exchanges undertaken via the F4F hub to minimise the processing time and improve the accuracy of information flow. In the UK, the F4F portal now processes over 100k documents and handles over 50k orders a year. In Italy, F4F handles the order requirements of 30 customers. Being a seasonal business, the B2B capability comes into its own during busy periods. Ordering customers work against pre-entered ‘contracts’ which specify price, contract duration and quantity. “The next phase of development is to extend the

functionality to enable follow-up of delivery status as well as current order status checks,” says Sue Rose, Yara’s UK IS Co-ordinator. Seasonal business The most recent project undertaken by F4F has been to automate the container loading planning for the Phosyn business. “This tool gets to the heart of the business’s shipping logistics and replaces a spreadsheet based system,” says Neil Paton from F4F. “We have developed a simple graphical interface which employs the drag and drop concept to accurately fill a container to capacity.” The tool will save time, will improve loading accuracy and will enable ‘real-time’ sharing of container plans by users based in different time zones around the world. Yara is currently integrating the F4F customer ordering concept into the South African business. “We have chosen F4F because of the positive experience Yara has had in Europe,” comments Willem Sloot from Yara South Africa. “We hope that F4F will provide automated links with our biggest trading partners. At the moment we have one customer in our trial, but in the future we want to include all significant wholesale customers and suppliers (approximately 35 in total). In a second step, we want to consider our individual retail customers (up to a thousand in total).” Yara & F4F overseas According to Egil Hogna, Mediterranean Business Unit Manager for Yara, “F4F has

enabled us to simplify the interface for our customers. The solution is not only efficient in its own sense, but as a tool it has enabled a standardised way of operating to the benefit of both our customers and Yara. F4F has allowed for a leaner back-office as a direct result of automating activities like ordering and invoicing and has brought about a significant reduction in the phone-calls fielded by office staff,” says Egil.