Cargill Makes Transactions Easy For Grain Customers

By Karla Paris

A distinctive, online-business solution is providing direct access and effortless business transactions for the company’s customers, putting grain contracts just an e-signature away

Cargill was seeking ways to improve the overall experience for its customers when it comes to handling transactions the agricultural giant. With 158,000 employees in 66 countries, the company committed to using its knowledge and experience to collaborate with its customers to help them fulfill goals. On August 18, Cargill’s AgHorizons announced that the company’s farm customers now have the ability to sign a grain delivery contract online, which is something that no other line grain company in Canada currently offers. 

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The new e-signature service offered by Cargill will allow producers the ability to sign agreements anytime, anywhere, eliminating the need for faxes and making business transactions with Cargill more effortless. It will also allow its customers online-business solutions by providing direct access to grain-marketing experts.

Even though Cargill already had a cost-efficient portal solution that its customers could access, the company transformed its AgHorizons website into a more powerful, outward-facing tool. AgHorizons now allows key customers to conduct business with Cargill over the web. Users are able to look up account information, manage contracts, and initiate some business transactions online. Customers also have on-demand access to transactional information.

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Collaborating with Cargill in this endeavor was Fujitsu. Together, the duo implemented a best-of-breed portal solution for Cargill’s grain-trading customers. Fujitsu designed a robust, scalable Microsoft .NET-based architecture that can scale to support up to 20,000 users, while delivering additional customer-support functionality. The website was targeted to support 1,000 concurrent users with 99 percent system availability. The website is also required to leverage transactional data from Cargill’s internal application — a scalable, responsive integration that was critical to the success of the project. The portal solution, along with the e-signature online ordering functionality, has greatly benefited Cargill, as it:

• Allows AgHorizon’s marketing team to highlight innovative new products
• Makes it easier to track contacts and accounts
• Opens a channel to richer content, including information targeted at specific users, user-defined content, and additional syndicated data feeds

With the new portal and e-signature functionality in place, agricultural producers can now access a wealth of information delivered by Cargill. The portal helps differentiate Cargill from its competitors by providing e-signature technology and making account information available online. This, in turn, has led to significant cost savings based on the reduced need for printed contracts.