Challenge

The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) identified an opportunity to improve their business processes by updating key information systems. The producer-related business cycle required a significant amount of manual work by the producers, agents, and the CWB. The processes were supported by more than 25 disparate applications, which also integrated to another 50 internal and external systems. By updating these systems, the CWB would be able to:

• Easily adapt to changing regulatory and market conditions.
• Provide web-based services to the producers, offering new products and support.
• Have an integrated producer-facing system.

Solution

Farmer Procurement and Payment Services (FPPS) has provided the CWB with a direct channel to do business with their most important stakeholders: the producers. The use of their web services has grown by a factor of 600% in the last year thanks to this new, easy-to-use way of doing business.

FPPS provides the CWB with a single source of information about the producers and provides the producer with a single destination to find out their standing with the CWB.

A new, modern, and unified service-oriented architecture (SOA) based application architecture provides a framework for future change that allows rapid adaptation to new business requirements.

Benefits

• Producers now do their CWB business directly rather than through agents.
• The CWB business centre has a single source for producer information.
• Web usage by producers has climbed 600%.
• 100% of CWB contracting is now electronic.
• 100% of CWB permits are now electronic.
• Adaptation to business change is greatly accelerated.
• There is a reduced risk of aging information systems.
• Visibility of financial information to the producer is increased.
• The process for financial payments to producers is streamlined.

Online Business Systems and Canadian Wheat Board received the 2009 Project of the Year Award from the Project Management Institute - Manitoba Chapter.