Centaur Grain

In a drive to adopt e-commerce, Centaur Grain Limited have again turned to Kingfisher Associates to write a suite of new interfaces into their bespoke Grain Trading System running on an IBM i-Series e-server.

Shaun Kelly, IT Systems Manager says, “This new software has been designed, developed and implemented on time and on budget feeding seamlessly into our Grain Trading System. The results are having a significant impact on the way we trade, freeing up staff to concentrate their energies on providing a better service to our customers, rather than hours spent manually entering data."

The Grain Trading System was originally developed by Kingfisher in 1999 providing a platform from which individual and co-operative farmers can choose whether to sell their commodities at today’s prices, or to market their grain collaboratively through a number of pools and schemes. Working closely with First4Farming (an agricultural consortium who provide the technical infrastructure to link participating organisations), documents are now exchanged electronically with those companies who have been equally quick to recognise the benefits of e-business.

Shaun Kelly adds, “Our systems are already delivering a unique level of knowledge and given the increasing demands of the whole of the food chain, this development helps to make us even more efficient”. He adds “Centaur have also been hugely successful in recent years – producing good price performance for our members and becoming one of the most significant participants in the UK market”.