Seafood retail company MWBrands uses Microsoft Dynamics® NAV to keep track of sales and financial transactions. In 2008, the company asked its IT partner Spargonet to design a disaster recovery solution. Spargonet recommended virtualisation of the live environments on new servers and rebuilding the existing system to create a disaster recovery facility—cutting spend on hardware and software by 60 per cent.

Taylor Shellfish Farms, a family-owned seafood business for more than 100 years, has 400 employees and worldwide revenues of U.S.$50 million. Because the Washington-based company employs just one person to manage its entire North America IT infrastructure, it sought to convert its IT operation from a largely manual one to a centralized, more automated system. As an early adopter of Microsoft® System Center Essentials 2010 technology, Taylor Shellfish Farms is now proactively monitoring its IT environment and troubleshooting issues from a central location. Software updates and deployments are accelerated through automation, enhancing security, system performance, and employee productivity. When the company implements Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology in late 2009, it expects to realize even greater efficiencies.

With offices in over 90 countries, smooth real-time communication and team collaboration are crucial to the Syngenta agribusiness group. The company upgraded its communication and desktop infrastructure by installing Windows Vista® and the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, with Microsoft Office Communicator® 2007, on 20,000 computers. Employees now communicate more effectively and economically, and Syngenta saves 30 percent on PC support costs.

With retail locations in 23 states, Southern States Cooperative’s business leaders saw the opportunity to use mobile technology to make corporate information easily available when and where needed. Using a professionally developed Windows® Mobile® application, the sales force can now do remote order entries, shelf checks, retail price checks, shelf label reprinting, and access up-to-date customer price information. By enabling mobile access to data and a consistent user experience, the solution helps support organizational objectives and increase customer satisfaction. While helping to realize more value from existing technology investments, the solution has made the re-order process more accurate and faster than the former paper-based methods.

Ridley, a manufacturer and distributor of animal feed and nutrition products, has plants and warehouses throughout the United States and Canada. The company needed a new enterprise resource planning system to manage its purchase of agricultural commodities and its batch-manufacturing processes of more than 47,000 customized product variations. With special attention to finding a flexible solution, Ridley analyzed its needs and considered solutions from Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle. The company chose to work with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Fullscope to implement Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics® AX. Today, Ridley has the flexibility it needs to manage operations companywide. And, the company estimates that Microsoft Dynamics AX will save it more than U.S.$1 million a year in staffing and maintenance costs compared to a solution from SAP that it also considered purchasing.

Large Russian agro-industrial holding Alpi turns to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V virtualization technology to optimize hardware use, increase user productivity while, and lower IT department workload in a more secure and easily managed IT environment.

Located in Hokitika on New Zealand’s West Coast, Westland Milk Products is an independent New Zealand co-operative dairy company that trades with more than 400 South Island farmers to produce a range of milk products for nutritional, food and beverage applications. The company’s vision is to deliver better value to local farm supplier shareholders and be the first choice in dairy. To maintain its niche position and continue to grow its presence in domestic and international markets, Westland Milk Products (Westland) targeted the improvement of its data management processes as a way to improve business performance. Today, an integrated IT platform delivers a single view of business Information across the company’s supply chain – from milk collection, manufacturing, research and development through to transport, export shipping and sales and logistics.

Leading agribusiness Syngenta needed to refresh its internal Web communications. Its virtual conferencing systems were too slow and did not accommodate a sufficient number of attendees in meetings. As part of the Infrastructure Consolidation Program it developed with long-term technology partner HP, the company also wanted to integrate its software systems more closely and provide employees with new, more efficient methods of electronic communication. It worked with Microsoft and HP to roll out Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 to 21,000 employees worldwide. Users can now organise real-time virtual presentations with hundreds of participants in a few clicks, check colleagues’ statuses from any application, and solve quick queries using instant messaging. Crucially, the solution saves the company 50 per cent in costs compared to the previous system.

Washington State’s Ste. Michelle Wine Estates was growing rapidly. That made it important for company executives to stay on top of the business—and difficult for them to do so. To give them the information that they needed to make better business decisions, the company adopted a dashboard solution based on Microsoft® Business Intelligence. The solution provides at-a-glance views of information on sales and distribution, finances, operations, human resources, and more. Visual displays provide rapid insights into sales performance, and users can drill down to information by brand, sales office, customer, and more. A multicolored map of the United States provides a quick view of state-level performance as measured against internal metrics. Data-driven business decisions enable the company to maintain and increase revenues, and the solution cost half as much as most alternatives.

Monsanto, one of the world’s leading agricultural companies, takes advantage of team collaboration and ubiquitous access to corporate information in its global business processes. But aging technology was creating slow connections and frustrations for users who wanted to expedite the transfer of documents and other information. To boost productivity and bandwidth, Monsanto deployed Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Cisco Wide Area Application Services. The result is that Monsanto employees have better tools for collaborating and for publishing information. In addition, use of bandwidth has been greatly improved, so people working in remote areas with limited connectivity options can experience LAN-like performance.