Customer Stories

Power Farming

Power Farming Implements Annata Dynamics to PFG Australia & Howard Australia.
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Power Farming Wholesale Limited is a fully independent and privately owned group of companies, who have a three-generation history of serving the New Zealand and Australian tractor and machinery markets.

The group is made up of Power Farming Wholesale Limited (wholesale distribution in New Zealand), Power Farming New Zealand Limited (retail distribution in New Zealand), Power Farming Group Australia Pty Limited (wholesale distribution of all the company’s tractor and precision mowing equipment brands in Australia) and Howard Australia Pty Limited (a Sydney based supplier of cultivation equipment, mowers, front-end loaders, seeders, and feeder / spreader equipment). Collectively, these four trading operations generate an annual turnover of approximately $300 million and employ around 350 people.

Sales are mainly through an owned or franchised retail chain consisting of 40 dealers in New Zealand, and through over 300 independent retailers in Australia. The New Zealand dealerships employ around 150 trained technicians. These technicians are available on a 24 hour / 7 days a week basis and are supported by seven personnel based at the Power Farming Head Office.

The company operates 14 websites representing a range of brands and mastheads across New Zealand and Australia. Put concisely, Power Farming Wholesale imports, stocks, manufactures, assembles and distributes agricultural machinery, accessories and parts.

Situation

Power Farming used three main software systems within the group. The one of most concern, was an automotive industry software created that was a highly customized and antiquated green screen AS/400 wholesale/distribution system which handled the wholesale business for the group. Issues existed around:

  • Difficulties integrating with other software
  • The inability to gain a global view of the entire business (each business action was effectively silo)
  • Limitations to supporting the sort of web presence and browser sophistication that user expectation demanded to keep up with the competition Limitations in ability to analyse and report on the data within the system and of course
  • The legacy nature of the solution itself and the inherent problems surrounding such an old solution in terms of support and further development This solution required complete replacement.

This solution required a complete replacement.

The second concern was a locally created automotive retail. This was used throughout the whole New Zealand Power Farming owned retailer / dealer network and covered branch stock, CRM, the sales cycle, finance, trade-ins and core financial. The level of user satisfaction was high so eventual integration to the overall replacement solution was all that was deemed necessary.

Implementation

Koorb’s (Annata’s certified reselling partner in this project) enabled Power Farming to meet their primary objective of visibility across the entire group with Annata Dynamics.

  • The strongest measurement of value delivered can be seen against stock inventory – critical when you carry over 100,000 stock lines. The customer estimates that real time visibility will see a drop of 15-20% of the total value of stock across the group – and this alone will completely fund the entire implementation.
  • Being able to track whole goods (tractors) from ‘cradle to grave’ also provides the opportunity to gauge when a customer is ready for a replacement – with a unit value of $100k plus capturing opportunities for repeat sales is a huge bonus.
  • Dealers will retain customer loyalty as they quickly supply spares and process warranties. Knowing crucial spares are only days away encourages customers to place orders rather than trying the next dealer.

 

  • Phase 1: Implement Annata Dynamics IDMS across Power Farming Wholesale (New Zealand) – May 2009 (go-live was end of November)
  • Phase 2: Roll-out to PFG (Australia), April 2010 – July 2010 (go-live was end of July). This was effectively a template roll-out and most of the work done in-house although Howard operates slightly differently to PFW/PFG so a longer time-frame was given and more consulting time included.

System Setup

The first phase (initial rollout to NZ) was done prior to Koorb adopting the Sure Step methodology and was done using ‘Koorb project methodology’ that is similar to Sure Step. The subsequesnt rollouts were done using the Sure Step methodology.

 

Significant Development

  • Due to the dealers using another system, an EDI solution was implemented to allow the two systems to communicate directly. This used a standard AX EDI platform (AIF) but there was minor customization involved in the messages between the two systems.
  • The dealer portal had changes made to fit this into an existing Power Farming intranet. There were also changes made to streamline this with Power Farming’s internal processes so that warranty claim validation is done more directly in the portal (this is standard in the latest version of IDMS) and so that parts orders can go straight through to the warehouse for picking without needing customer services involvement
  • Once the Australian business came on board, changes were made to automatically trigger direct supply from the sister company if parts are out-of-stock in the customer’s home country company but available in the other country.

 

Into The Future

There are no specific plans for further roll-outs but tis recognised that there may be a dealer roll-out, most likely after upgrading the current system to the latest version of Annata Dynamics IDMS (since the upgrade will be simpler before introducing a large number of additional users into the system.

The strongest measurement of value delivered can be seen against stock inventory – critical when you carry over 100,000 stock lines. We estimate that real time visibility dropped 15-20% of the total value of stock across the group – and this alone funded completely the entire implementation.

Michael BarrettIT Manager Power Farming

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