When deregulation began to sweep the Australian grain industry in the 1990s, Glenn Mason knew that customer response times would become crucial to success in a competitive open market. Mason is Chief Information Officer for GrainCorp, an Australian agribusiness based in Sydney and the dominant grain handler on the east coast of Australia. The company primarily offers grain storage services—with a 21-million-ton capacity—but also sells seed and fertilizers and provides transportation, marketing, processing, and financial services to grain buyers and sellers.

GrainCorp has 1,300 employees who work at 300 locations across an 800,000-square-kilometer region. During harvest times, the employee base swells to 3,500, with extra workers added at the company's 286 receiving and storage sites. Employees are also located at the company's nine port terminals, four divisional offices, and Sydney headquarters.

"We are a decentralized organization with great distances between employees," Mason explains. "Most of our business data was locked in centralized business systems that were inaccessible to mobile field workers and executives during the workday, when they were away from their offices. They needed instant access to order and delivery information to make better decisions on the run and respond to customers."

GrainCorp transportation coordinators took customer orders over the phone and recorded them in paper ledgers. They then found carriers for the grain through a network of third-party trucking companies, again using the phone. At the end of each day, clerks photocopied the ledgers to enter orders into the company's SAP order system. Transportation coordinators took their ledgers home with them in the evening in case truckers called with delays that would require adjustments to a pickup or delivery.

Coordinators at GrainCorp storage sites also used phone calls and faxes to manage the approximately 10,000 trucks that arrived each month to pick up grain. "We needed to know when these trucks were arriving so we could have the appropriate staff in place," says Stephen Nicholas, Supply Chain Manager for GrainCorp. "However, staff members were pulling their hair out trying to estimate when the 20 to 100 trucks a day would be arriving at each site."

On the delivery side of the business, the company was inconsistently meeting customer expectations for a key performance metric that GrainCorp calls DIFOTQ—Delivered In Full, On Time, and at Quality—a measure of how successfully the company delivers what the customer ordered, when the customer requested it. "Customers complained that our deliveries were sometimes late, but we didn't have the data on hand to check or to fix the problem," Nicholas says. Customer service personnel were scattered across five business units, each using its own issues-tracking system. Customers would often have to make multiple calls to track down the person or information that they needed.

The decentralized nature of GrainCorp's business also impeded basic business workflows. Paper-based approvals for routine activities such as hiring, purchase order requisitions, and procurement had to be routed through people in multiple locations, which took days and hampered the company's ability to move quickly.

Executives, who are some of the company's most mobile employees, were often out of the information loop when they were out of the office. They wanted to access business data any time, from anywhere, to keep processes moving and to spot problems immediately.

"Our success depends on how well we service our customers," Mason says. "We knew that to succeed in a deregulated environment, we would need to increase our organizational efficiency by reducing the layers between GrainCorp and its customers and driving down costs. We wanted to connect our 300 sites to create a digital community of users who could respond as if they were all in one location, to provide employees with easy access to the information that they needed to deliver an outstanding customer experience."

To increase organizational efficiency, Mason set out to simplify the company's technology infrastructure, which had grown over time into an eclectic mixture that was expensive to maintain—and a barrier to innovation and agility. "Sixty percent of our IT costs went to supporting our heterogeneous environment and only 40 percent to developing new solutions," Mason says. "We wanted to reverse that ratio."

After evaluating the software market, GrainCorp decided to standardize on Microsoft software for most of its infrastructure systems, such as messaging, collaboration, file and print, directory services, mobile application delivery, and software development. "Microsoft has a broad suite of programs that work well together, have a common user interface, and are cost-effective," Mason says.

In just 18 months, GrainCorp consolidated eight business systems to two and deployed 350 mobile devices (Pocket PCs, Tablet PCs, smart phones, and notebook computers) to executives and field workers. At the same time, Mason's staff started to develop new workflow, field, and mobile applications to help management and workers access the data that they needed.

One such application, called Haul IT, replaces the transportation coordinators' paper ledgers with an electronic system. Coordinators enter customer orders directly into Haul IT, which pulls master customer data from the SAP customer database to populate the order and helps the coordinator identify the most cost-effective trucker for the route. Coordinators have 24-hour access to Haul IT from their Smartphones.

Customer service, logistics, and stock personnel at all GrainCorp locations now use a common issue-management system and customer database to respond to customers. When customers call with questions or complaints, GrainCorp staff can now quickly access the shipment data to respond.

The IT team then created executive scorecards that show key business health indicators, accessible to management from desktop or mobile computers. Managers can see at-a-glance views of delivery times and grain quality levels, and access more detail to uncover specific problems and drive continuous improvement. For the pickup side of the business, customers can now enter their own truck arrival times into Haul IT, which eliminated phone calls and faxes and made customers responsible for data accuracy.

Mason's staff also created automated workflows for more than 30 standard business processes (such as purchase order approval) and delivered them to managers using mobile devices. These routine processes now run continuously and smoothly, without delays and interruptions caused by traveling employees or stalled process steps. The workflows automatically route approvals to required individuals, send e-mail messages when reminders are needed, and keep geographically separated team members on track and on task.

With its new technologies, GrainCorp has achieved more on-time deliveries and greater order accuracy, smoothed its pickup scheduling, and lubricated its supply chain to eliminate delays across the business. GrainCorp has also created software "windows" into every phase of its business, through which executives and field managers can gain quick insight into business health, for faster decision-making and problem resolution.

GrainCorp transportation coordinators can keep up with order bookings and pickup scheduling from anywhere, using Smartphones, rather than wait until they get back to their office computers. They can match grain orders with trucks more quickly and easily, identifying the most cost-effective transportation resources for each job and minimizing order errors by pulling data directly from the SAP customer database. Once the order is placed, Haul IT transmits the data directly into the SAP order system. Each night, GrainCorp has programmed Haul IT to send e-mail and text messages to drivers, reminding them of their GrainCorp jobs the next day. The GrainCorp financial department uses Haul IT to create sales and purchase orders.

"Using this solution, we can respond to customers faster, because we can confirm schedule changes and take corrective action sooner," Mason says. "We're also able to offer more family-friendly employment to our field workers, because they're not stuck in the office at night doing paperwork and scheduling the next day's orders." GrainCorp has been able to reduce its logistics resources by 20 percent through the automated efficiencies. "We're able to complete the same number of transactions with fewer people," Mason says.

Using a single, companywide issue-tracking system, GrainCorp is able to resolve problems in minutes that before took hours or days to resolve. "When transport issues are involved, and a truckload of grain is sitting somewhere in the hot sun, fast problem resolution is of the essence," says Graham Matheson, Client Relations Manager for GrainCorp. "Also, there is a great deal of history in customer relationships that we're now able to share with employees throughout the company. We're better able to strengthen those relationships and cross-sell more services."

Since it implemented the mobile executive reporting system, GrainCorp has boosted its DIFOTQ metric to 99.6 percent-meaning that 99.6 percent of its deliveries are accurate and on time. "There's still room for improvement, but at least we have the data now to know which issues to work on, at which sites," Nicholas says. "Best of all, we're able to share our performance data with customers, who now get 360-degree feedback from us on how we perform to their expectations. It shows that we're proactive in responding to problems. It's a huge competitive differentiator."

With customers now able to enter their own pickup scheduling information into GrainCorp computers, GrainCorp has dramatically increased information accuracy and smoothed out truck arrivals at its 286 storage sites. Because pickups are scheduled more evenly throughout the day, site workers aren't frantic at peak periods and idle at others. GrainCorp was even able to extend the scheduling deadline from 15:00 the day before to 10:00 the day of delivery, which gives customers more planning time.

GrainCorp now captures key performance indicators (KPIs) companywide, which gives executives rapid insights into business health. This helps them take corrective action sooner and make decisions faster. "Our executives can review scorecard reports from their Smartphones; see red, yellow, and green indicators of business health; and drill down to view detailed spreadsheets. They can send e-mail messages or make phone calls from wherever they are, which frees up more time for face-to-face engagements during the day," Mason says.

Executives also use their mobile devices to be more productive during idle times, such as commutes, to check e-mail messages. "Using mobile devices, our executives have freed up at least five hours per week, per user, in additional productivity," Mason says.

Managers throughout the company use the new automated workflows-also accessible by mobile devices-to keep routine business processes moving. The company can more quickly hire people, purchase needed equipment, and approve routine requests such as travel expenses and personal leave. "With automated workflows delivered over mobile devices, we've reduced cross-site approval turnaround time by 50 percent," Mason says.

Finally, Mason has successfully reversed his IT resource usage ratio: today, 60 percent of his staff is devoted to new-solutions development and 40 percent to existing systems support. "The IT staff can be more proactive with the Microsoft technologies that we've deployed," Mason says. "We have an environment that facilitates rapid application development, structured data, and a robust information delivery framework. On average, we've improved our new-solutions delivery time by 50 percent, which has a direct impact on the business." GrainCorp has also reduced IT expenditures and management costs by 5 percent by standardizing on a Microsoft infrastructure.

Mason and his team plan to extend GrainCorp's technology infrastructure by adding more sophisticated mobile messaging and sharing even more operational data with customers. "We're able to deliver technology that empowers our people at every level of the organization, and we're able to deliver it proactively," Mason says. "It's a nice feeling to be ahead of problems for a change."

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