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More Questions?

Case Study UK

Wintouch CRM provides online access for largest committed grain business in UK

Centaur Grain Limited is a farmer-owned grain marketing business with regional offices in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Wiltshire (all in the UK.) Annually, they market well in excess of 1 million tons of combinable crops, making them the largest committed grain business in the UK.

Centaur has also developed long-term contracts to supply key consumers in the food industry, including household brand names, and aspires to be the grain marketing company of choice, adding value through innovation, service, knowledge and shared commitment.

Centaur's IT System
Centaur's core business platform is an IBM iSeries midrange server. This hosts an integrated system consisting of ledgers and a custom Grain Marketing solution, provided by Kingfisher Associates (UK) Ltd., an IBM Business Partner. The IT infrastructure links five regional offices, and provides remote access to systems for the Farm Service (similar to regional) Managers.

The Problem
UK farming is subject to powerful and volatile market forces. In that environment, Centaur recognized that more was needed to protect the interests of over 2,000 farmers who make up and collectively own Centaur.

They identified four important issues that needed to be addressed:

• Marketing
  In a rapidly changing business environment, Centaur was constantly identifying new opportunities and markets for their farmers. They needed to ensure these are communicated effectively, which included 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. Centaur recognised the ability to measure service was essential in maintaining those levels and in delivering improvements. This would enable them to retain customers and grow the business in the future.
• Turn Abundant Data Into Information
  Existing systems were designed to process and capture vast amounts of data. Centaur 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 Centaur's business across five regional offices introduced the risk of data fragmentation. They 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 Centaur that they needed a means of managing their customer base – a CRM solution.

The Selection Process
Senior management went through a process to find a solution that addressed these issues. Various options were considered, including re-engineering Centaur's internal systems from scratch. They looked at various CRM and Web solutions, including industry leading brand names. In the end, Centaur was introduced to John Phelan (Touchtone's UK representative) who presented Wintouch.

Through a series of meetings, Centaur explained the CRM requirements to John Phelan. He and Touchtone, a USA based company, showed comprehensively how Wintouch could meet their needs. Phelan arranged customized Web-based demos so Centaur could see the application prototyped using their own data. This gave them the confidence that their needs could indeed be met on the iSeries with a native CRM solution.

Why Centaur Chose Wintouch
Centaur ultimately concluded that Wintouch provided the solultion that was perfect for their needs. The application was able to use live data from Centaur's existing systems in real-time. Other solutions would have entailed implementing separate, Windows-based systems for their applications, and creating copies of Centaur's data.

That would have meant the data used by the CRM solution would no longer be live   requiring, instead, nightly batch updates   interfaces between systems would be needed, increasing integration, 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, as well as providing real-time integration and live updates.

Implementing Wintouch
Once Centaur agreed to go ahead, work began quickly. Using powerful software tools, Touchtone was able to customize the solution specifically to Centaur and their installed software solutions – all on their IBM iSeries. When the time came to deploy it, both Touchtone and John Phelan provided on-site presence, working with the Centaur team and with other existing software providers.

The Benefits of Wintouch

• Everyone uses the same up-to-date, real-time information
• Wintouch Activities capture customer contact information and make it available to all users of the system
• The Wintouch groups and reporting features combine to make data extraction to Excel and other applications straightforward and easy to use
• Centaur's 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. Centaur's next goals are to automate processes using the workflow and email integration capabilities of Wintouch.