Wengfu Australia: Cerebrum (Aust) Pty Ltd

About the Client

Wengfu Australia is a subsidiary of the Wengfu Group, a Chinese manufacturer of a wide range of phosphate-based products including phosphate fertilisers, chemicals, food and animal feed additives. Wengfu Australia sells fertilisers to rural retailers or to contractors who apply fertilisers to pastures or crops. Ranked 7th in the world for production of finished phosphate fertiliser, the combination of the company’s rock reserves, manufacturing assets and supply capacity is unmatched by any other fertiliser wholesaler in the Australian market.

Challenge

Wengfu wanted to offer a self-managed online portal to their customers, which allows them to access their contract and booking details, make new bookings, adjust scheduled bookings, and much more over time. Wengfu's business success is also based on the structure and flexibility of the booking fulfilment and delivery chain with a huge number of warehouses across Australia. The desired online portal had to be easy to use, even if the business processes are exceptionally complex behind the scene. The fact that users often access the system from rural areas in Australia, often with unreliable Internet connectivity, was another challenge of this project. Most of the business logic and data storage had to reside outside of the portal in order to enable other systems used by Wengfu to retain control of the data and users.

We were after a very simple, clean and fast system that would be first in class in our industry. This was no easy feat with our business having such a vast range of continually moving parts. Working with Simon and the team at Cerebrum has been an effortless, rewarding and enjoyable experience. Their ability and openness to understand and adapt to our business and our customer needs is exceptional.

—Luke Harmer, Commercial Manager, Wengfu Australia

Solution

During an initial requirements gathering and documentation phase, including API specification and design concepts, Cerebrum designed and developed a modern and robust online system that masks Wengfu’s complex business model, and launched the fertbook portal.

A clear user interface with customised workflows allows users to quickly and easily make sure bookings are always correct. It enables them to view real-time status of contracts and bookings, view news updates and notifications.

The portal features a two-layered, real-time authentication against an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, which stores and manages financial, orders, inventory, shipping and billing information. Data between these systems is exchanged in a secure and failsafe way.

Geographically located in Australia, the hosting infrastructure can be scaled up and down as required. This flexibility ensures that the system is always available at the user’s disposal, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and even in peak seasons when farmers cannot afford to wait for their time-critical products.

The portal has become a huge success from the first day of its deployment and Cerebrum has been working closely with Wengfu to add new features to always stay one step ahead of its competitors.

I’d honestly like to thank Cerebrum for getting us to a best-in-breed solution. Over the past seven years our partnership with Simon and the team has been second to none. Cerebrum’s foresight to look beyond, mixed with a continuous improvement build strategy, has taken our service offering to a whole new level. From the start Cerebrum took into account the dynamic nature of our business, developing a solution hugely successful from the first day of its deployment. The fertbook portal is industry leading. This is testament to Cerebrum’s intelligent simplicity—creating an accessible and easy to use product despite complex business operations and substantial moving parts. The responsiveness, dedication, and measured improvement Cerebrum brings to the table continues to achieve superior outcomes. We are grateful for the guidance Simon and the team have provided, allowing us to leverage these insights and take the product in-house to continue the next phase of evolution in the fertbook brand.

—Stephen Luedi, Information Systems Manager, Wengfu Australia

Results

Consultancy, requirement analysis and documentation.
Customer self-service portal system.
Integration with corporate ERP system.
Enterprise hosting setup, featuring SSL/TLS, CDN (content delivery network), etc.