Case Study

AHDB

The Challenge

Manual Processes

Established in 2008 the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) purpose is to inspire farmers, growers, and industry to succeed in a rapidly changing world. They equip the industry with easy to use, practical know-how, which they can apply straight away to make better decisions and improve their performance. AHDB is a statutory levy board and is funded by farmers, growers, and others in the supply chain. Themes include building sustainable plant and animal health and facilitating wholesome and trusted food in the supply chain. AHDB were running a manual process for interactions with their stakeholders and suppliers. This process was very labour intensive, inefficient, and prone to errors. Currently for all these communications they are using emails: contacting suppliers by email, receiving quotes by email, and communicating requirements internally within AHDB via email. Tracing orders, requirements, quotes, and other communications was a manual process of searching through these emails to find the relevant communication. Communication with suppliers were getting unmanageably complex, across branches and departments covering the 400 staff organisation.

The Solution

Automating Processes

The cloud-based Enterprise solution focused on addressing the collaboration with and communication between the purchasing service desk, the suppliers, and the internal customers. Automating quotation requests from internal users; quotes from the supplier base; and the handling of the resulting orders. The solution also addressed the automation of internal customer orders to these suppliers, through the service desk. Reducing the errors associated with generating these orders and ensuring that they match to the appropriate quotations. Plus, critically it provides an audit trail for all requests, quotations, and orders. AHDB’s service desk approach ensures control of access to the suppliers and ensures that latest pricing is obtained via quotations. The flexibility of the processes, that the Claritum system delivered, allowed AHDB to achieve a managed collaboration between suppliers and the ultimate end user. Management has comprehensive permissions and workflow controls to ensure alignment to best practice processes and the real time management information they need to ensure smooth operations, client and supplier side billing and accurate client reporting. To streamline billing, Claritum exports client sales ledger and supplier purchase ledger data on approved costs to their financial systems, for invoicing and settlement This process helps track revenues and expenditure, reduce administration time, and improve the accuracy of their invoicing processes.

Benefits

Significant Gains in Efficiency

AHDB achieved significant gains in efficiency for all parties involved: AHDB users, procurement service desk and suppliers. With fewer errors being made. The new automated process transformed their procurement process. Removing manual email process steps and automating interactions. They can provide feedback to their suppliers, based on the audit trail of activity associated with each supplier and the accumulated data over time. Plus, the new process addresses issues of compliancy and provides clear reporting that includes the savings achieved. Claritum helps the core team to maximise efficiencies and minimise administration, avoiding errors, re-keying, time-consuming manual processes and therefore frees the team up to add more value to clients and get the best from suppliers. It will also ensure that there is no direct engagement with suppliers, without the service desk being involved. Quotations will be automated and accessible only to the purchasing desk. AHDB uses Claritum more broadly in terms of a completely automated processes. Adding the functional blocks from the Claritum library to support additional processes, such as invoicing and stock management.