Welcome to the second issue of The Hub and thank-you for the positive and useful feedback on the first newsletter. As a response we have refined some of the design and included some multilingual articles for our European customers.

The F4F business continues to expand. Geographically we have new country roll-outs planned, or underway, in Sweden and New Zealand respectively. 

In countries and regions where F4F is already trading new members are continuing to join our communities. Existing members are completing even more B2B connections with their customers and suppliers, and deploying our range of new services. And finally, the number of messages running through the F4F infrastructure continues to double year-on-year.  

This issue of The Hub aims to show examples of this expansion. We focus on our new customers in Germany, our latest X.400 service particularly for France and the Benelux, and new services for Anglia Farmers in the UK, Pfizer in Australia, ForFarmers, Cefetra and Peterson in Holland, Glon Sanders in France and Sidi Parani in South Africa.  Internally our rapid expansion has meant recruiting four new members of staff. 

Gurinder Gulatti, a native German speaker based at the UK Uxbridge Support Centre, will improve our service to customers in Germany. Svetlana Kortchik, also based at UK Uxbridge, strengthens our in-house product development team. The technical development and deployment team will be joined by Chris Hughes for South Africa, and Joachim Crombez for France and the Benelux. And finally thank-you to all of you for your ongoing support and custom.  Nick Evans Managing Director

Support success for top pharmaceutical firm

Pfizer Australia is the country’s leading provider of prescription medicines and animal health products with more than 1,100 staff and annual exports of in excess of AU $100 million.

The company first appointed F4F to provide eMessaging hub services to electronically connect its major agricultural clients with the animal health business in 2004. Pfizer chose F4F because the company was impressed by the technology platform and competitive costs, together with service levels, the depth and understanding of the agricultural industry’s needs and the proven success and endorsement of F4F community members. 

Significant internal costs were saved, mainly through the development of the F4F architecture platform including use of the Adaptris eAI tool, flexible reusable message schemas and reduction of manual intervention, keying and errors. This freed up IT, customer services and accounts receivable staff to greater value adding activities. 

Pfizer’s positive experience led to a new outsourcing and support strategy for its eBusiness across the company, leveraging F4F’s staff and technology to deliver inbound and outbound eBusiness at lowest total cost to the company. Pfizer’s eBusiness Facilitator particularly highlights the exceptional support provided by F4F, using remote security enabled access, to the company’s eBusiness adaptor and systems within agreed service level agreements and security protocols.

 F4F has since been recommended internally to Pfizer’s other businesses units such as veterinary wholesalers, hospital and grocery. This has created additional business opportunities for F4F with Pfizer including introducing eBusiness electronic trading to new market segments and targeted trading partners.

The F4F team in South Africa has been involved in setting up business system integration between Sidi Parani and Yara within the region. 

The F4F development is a pilot project which will enable the transfer of electronic orders, order confirmations, shipment advice, invoices and remittance advice to be carried out between the two companies. 

“The idea is then to rollout a similar process between Yara and a number of their other customers in South Africa,” explains F4F’s South Africa’s Peter Leppan. “In addition we are also planning to link Sidi Parani to GWK as well as to their Field Agents who run an off line electronic sales order system called EKB

An integral F4F deliverable has been to overcome the issues of poor connectivity and network coverage in an area of the country where it is not very reliable or stable,” he notes. “We will also be enabling automatic pricing, product and debtor updates direct to the Agent’s laptops and at a later stage the system will allow full farm account status look-up capability. 

One future enhancement to the functionality will allow an Agent to apply for a linked farm finance agreement which will be processed, agreed

or rejected by the co-op and confirmed back to the Agent via the system.” The gain that F4F’s services will deliver to Sidi Parani and Yara will be a streamlining of business processes and a huge reduction of sales order administration. 

“The development should ultimately lead to fewer credit notes and more transparency of goods movements through the supply chain,” Peter adds. “F4F is currently putting this solution into place with approximately 37 agents for Sidi Parani. 

We will then be able to offer the same solution to the Yara representatives out in the field,” Peter explains. It is anticipated that the project will be completed by the end of August 2008.

Animal feed lab results transmitted across France

Receiving and checking over 24,000 raw material or end product samples from 40 different production sites is a critical part of the animal feed manufacturing process for one French company that has been made simpler and easier by F4F technology.

Sanders is the animal nutrition and feed supply branch of the Glon Group, one of the private leading agri-food companies in France. The company uses ten different authorised independent laboratories to analyse the thousands of raw feed samples it takes each year checking quality and nutritional value. 

Sanders had been investigating options for automatic data integration with laboratories for some time, but given the complexity of the task and the many different computer systems involved it had not been followed up. However, it was becoming increasingly urgent that a

Simon Thiré, Glon Group’s IT specialist, explains that the company wanted a data integration solution that would eliminate manual processing, improve accuracy and remove costly time-delays and production line down-time “We needed a more efficient way of talking to our suppliers and laboratories so that we could receive results as soon as the analysis had been finalised,” says Simon. 

“F4F’s solution avoided any internal IT redevelopment, and was based on the EZFlux XML document standard that we were already using with suppliers. All external analyses are now transmitted through the F4F platform and automatically integrated into our quality

management systems.” F4F’s European Director of Business Development Monique Brown explains that the F4F platform has also allowed Sanders to follow-up individual laboratory performances and response times. 

The labs have responded positively to the new system, take-up has been high with a fast deployment and little disruption to current working practices. “The next step, currently in development, is to automate analysis requests removing any manual re-keying by laboratory staff.,” adds Monique. 

“To be able to immediately respond to any variation in the quality or nutritional values of our raw materials has an enormous impact on Sanders’ entire manufacturing process from sourcing and production, through to final feed quality and profit,” says Simon.

Plus de 24 000 échantillons de matières premières ou produits finis, prélevés dans une quarantaine d’usine sont analysés chaque année. En outre, la récupération des données analytiques dans leur système de gestion qualité répond à un niveau d'exigence propre à Sanders. 

Face à la problématique d’intégration des résultats d’analyses et de récupération des données analytiques/sources externes dans leur système qualité, Sanders se tourne en 2007 vers F4F Europe pour élaborer une solution d’échange électronique avec les laboratoires. « Nous souhaitions une solution externe et pérenne avec pour objectifs : réduire le temps consacré à gérer les interfaces et améliorer l'efficacité quant à l'intégration

Sans oublier que Sanders devait gérer des interfaces spécifiques pour chaque laboratoire, et mettre en place des tables de correspondance et les maintenir. « L’idée d’une intégration automatique avec certains laboratoires avait par ailleurs été abandonnée compte tenu de la complexité de l’interface. Il était dès lors urgent de standardiser la récupération des informations externes. 

Le standard EZFlux, déjà en place chez Sanders dans l’échange avec ses fournisseurs de matières premières, fut dès lors envisagé », nous confirme Simon. Ce nouveau projet EZFlux spécifique aux laboratoires n’impliquera aucun développement interne chez Sanders et l’on se félicite des bénéfices qui en découlent.

Monique Brown, Directrice Business Development de F4F Europe nous explique que l’expérience est vécue avec les laboratoires de façon positive. « Ils ont dans la grande majorité adopté le système, le déploiement fut rapide et la durée d’implémentation par laboratoire est relativement faible » ajoute Monique. 

L’étape suivante, l’intégration des demandes d’analyse vers les laboratoires est actuellement en cours d’implémentation, ce qui permettra aux laboratoires d’éviter toute ressaisie à la réception des échantillons, nous explique Monique. 

ForFarmers manufactures and sells compound animal feed in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Denmark, Cefetra sources and supplies the raw feed materials and Peterson, also known as Control Union, supplies inspection, laboratory and logistical services for many agricultural commodities. 

F4F has facilitated the seamless movement of documents amongst the three partners through its centralised E-Hub using the EZFlux XML standard. F4F is the preferred partner of EZFluz, the European Association for electronic data interchange (EDI) standards in agricultural commodities. 

“Streamlining the links between Peterson, Cefetra and ForFarmers has been a major project for F4F in Europe and is a very powerful example of our technology,” says F4F’s European Director of Business Development Monique Brown. “More than 8,000 documents have already been exchanged since the project’s launch in late 2007.” 

All instructions related to shipments, barges, weights and destinations follow the same course through the E-Hub. For example Cefetra advises Peterson Logistics when to expect a cargo while at the same time informing ForFarmers that the

 “E-communication with our customers had always had a very prominent place in our company as we deal with multilateral contacts,” says Henk Kikkert, director at Peterson Logistics. “As a service company Peterson Logistics tended to adapt to whatever the customer wanted. But over time, this had led to a myriad of IT solutions, which as a whole no longer deserved the word ‘solution’ as it had gradually become very difficult to maintain all the different requirements of all our customers. This was the principal reason in becoming a founding member of EZFlux.” 

He believes Peterson looks at the F4F E-Hub system from a slightly different angle to Cefetra and ForFarmers where the benefit is in streamlining back-office processes. “We see this as the ideal tool to make ICT maintainable. There will be cost savings but for us this is a very gradual process showing beneficial results over a longer term, whereas our trading company partners have