Business partner integration drives supply chain success and cost efficiencies for Irish Dairy Board

Customer background

The Irish Dairy Board is a commercial cooperative and the major international exporter of Irish dairy products worldwide. The Irish Dairy Board, which owns the internationally established Kerrygold^®, is Ireland’s biggest exporter of dairy products. Consumer dairy products, including butter, cheese and milk powders, together with a varied choice of food ingredients, are marketed in a wide range of countries covering every continent.

Business challenge

At a time when the cost of goods is rising and margins are tightening, companies like the Irish Dairy Board want to help ensure that timely and accurate information is flowing through a centralized supply chain. Due to the perishable nature of its products, it was also important for the Irish Dairy Board to improve processing and delivery times by eliminating manual processes from the supply chain.

With a business community comprised of hundreds of suppliers and customers across 90 countries, the Irish Dairy Board recognized the need to build a real-time, electronic commerce element into its supply chain as a means of growing its global business. The challenge, however, as the company moved from a legacy environment to a real-time enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, was to integrate this diverse set of suppliers and customers with a broad set of requirements, demands, and technology environments.

Solution

For added flexibility, the solution was developed through a combination of Sterling B2B Integrator, connecting the Irish Dairy Board to their main trading partners, and Sterling B2B Collaboration Network, an on demand B2B network that provides connectivity to the remainder of partners. This combined solution helps enable the Irish Dairy Board to use one of the most efficient and cost effective methods to connect to their trading partners, simplifying and streamlining supplier relationships upstream, and providing comprehensive visibility throughout the supply chain.

Sterling B2B Integrator is also used to support the various integration requirements of the ERP project. “Instead of ripping and replacing systems, we created business processes that traverse legacy and varied ERP environments,” explains John O’Moore, General Manager, Information Systems, Irish Dairy Board. O’Moore continued, “Sterling B2B Integrator was selected for its proven technology capable of supporting the real-time exchange of data between all parties using a wide range of data formats.”

Several departments within the Irish Dairy Board use Sterling B2B Integrator for customer orders, supplier invoices, and stock movements. To support partners with limited technological sophistication, many transactions are also supported through Web portal interfaces.

Sterling B2B Collaboration Network provides the Irish Dairy Board with comprehensive connectivity that simplifies real-time collaboration with suppliers and customers independent of their technical capability. With a significant percentage of orders coming through electronic data interchange, the Irish Dairy Board needed a solution it could trust to handle the flow of information.

Key benefits

With Sterling B2B Integrator and Sterling B2B Collaboration Network, the Irish Dairy Board has a solution that manages both direct and indirect communications to achieve one of the most effective and efficient trading relationships. By streamlining its supply chain, the Irish Dairy Board is able to onboard suppliers and customers faster – reducing the onboarding process from days to hours, depending upon each customer’s needs.

The Irish Dairy Board has achieved enhanced visibility across its supply chain, enabling real-time tracking and reporting so the company can make quicker and more informed business decisions to help minimize errors and create additional efficiencies.

Looking toward the future, IBM provides the Irish Dairy Board with a reliable, scalable, and security-rich communications foundation for enhanced global collaboration. ‘‘Meeting customer requirements is critical and at the forefront of CIO discussions. Integration technology is essential if companies are going to minimize inventory and optimize on-shelf availability. The IBM solution is sufficiently scalable to meet the future demands of customers and suitably flexible to address our corporate growth plans,” concludes O’Moore.