Stellar & Global Dairy Trade

With sellers based in the USA, Europe, India and Australasia, and with buyers worldwide, GDT facilitates the annual sale of approximately 900,000 metric tonnes of dairy products. Its strength lies in secure electronic trading and an auction process that provides sellers with the best achievable price for products while assuring buyers they will not pay more than other bidders for the same product.

The challenge

GDT came to Stellar to establish a reporting system in 2011, as part of a broader review of all IT systems. This included an auction platform rebuild and a new-look public website. The company also wanted to help sellers and buyers to understand what was happening in the market faster and more easily. Their customers didn’t want to merely complete trades, they also wanted to understand industry pricing and see key global shifts.

In the existing system, manually collected data were being emailed individually to clients in hard-to-digest spreadsheets, with the risk of becoming irrelevant by the time they could be properly analysed.

GDT’s objectives were:

• Future-proof the reporting arm of its dairy auction website as buyer and seller registrations continued to grow.
• Create a sophisticated reporting system with the ability to identify gaps and opportunities in the business.

The solution

Stellar proposed and implemented a Microsoft BI solution. Using the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 suite of products, including a SQL Server Database, Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services, the reporting system captures trading results to provide a whole new ability to dig into the information along with the almost instant provision of trading results for all sellers.

Now users need only click within a secure online portal to see instant and accurate graphics rendered through SQL Server Reporting Services or presented on the GDT portal from SSRS generated extract files. Users can see the latest sales and index shifts alongside regular industry updates, and they get an immediate event summary report following every auction.

Just as valuable is the new ability to see what is happening all over the world. Sellers can now spot where new markets are emerging for different product mixes. Trades are broken down by product type, location and forward delivery times chosen by auction winners.

The benefits

• Less time and effort spent on providing sufficient data to users.
• Elimination of date errors arising from manual methods.
• Ability to serve larger groups of users simultaneously through automated reports in portal.
• Better security with a system that restricts what data users can access.
• Ability to identify growth opportunities through greater visibility across segmented data.