Over the last two years Substantial Software has collaborated closely with Wengfu Australia in designing and building the next iteration of their industry-famous customer self-service platform “Fertbook”.
Wengfu Australia is a major Australian fertiliser supplier based in Port Melbourne, operating via 5 ports with distribution sites spanning the southeastern coast of Australia. Wengfu Australia’s parent company Guizhou Phosphate & Chemical Group with annual revenue of over US$6 billion is the world’s third largest manufacturer of phosphate fertiliser and phosphate chemical products.
Wengfu Australia is a company that uses their highly experienced local team to take that huge backing and target the unique growing conditions of Australian farms. Wengfu Australia continually innovates inside their distribution sites and in the technology that backs them and the rest of their supply chain. That’s where we come in.
The Fertbook landing page
Wengfu Australia has always been one step ahead of the rest in their customer experience, and it was time for us to help them take that to the next level. We set out to create a comprehensive online platform that could simplify and speed up all of the major steps of the sales and delivery process. It needed to be extremely simple to use even if the processes were very complex behind the scenes (they were). The key people to cater to were:
Sales
Distribution
To put it all together we built a cross-platform mobile app and a web app.
Fertbook is used internally at Wengfu Australia as the all-in-one sales suite. Using it, sales representatives can review order history, quickly find their customer contacts, and access live stock levels. However, they predominantly log in to Fertbook to issue contracts to their local customers, something they can easily do while at customer sites via the mobile app.
If you haven’t worked in fertiliser then Wengfu Australia appears to have a pretty unique model for their orders. Often their customers are large organisations with multiple layers, and in these cases their head office may strike the original sales agreement with Wengfu Australia. That fertiliser may be allocated at a later date to specific branches and may be blended with other existing contracts to create unique formulations for specific uses. Individual truckloads of fertiliser may also have additional liquids applied to them, be bagged, or a number of other modifications. All of this can be done on the fly when booking in collection, and all of this can be done easily by the customer as self-service via Fertbook.
This is why an off the shelf solution was not appropriate. The flexibility of creating bespoke software allowed us to build these complex ideas into a dynamic and foolproof user interface.
Without trucks, Australia stops
That’s been a motto of Australian trucking for decades, and it’s true - without trucks, food doesn’t get to stores and fertiliser certainly doesn’t get to the farms that produce it. Anything we can do to make the lives of trucks drivers easier or safer is worth doing. Fertbook’s carrier check-in feature certainly makes it easier.
When a truck driver arrives at a distribution site to collect a booking, the Fertbook app lets them complete check-in while they are still queued up at the gate. By checking in they can confirm their truck details and booking details, and instruct site staff exactly where to load the fertiliser into their trailers. As they do this, their vehicle registration is automatically checked against the national database to ensure that they are legally able to carry the booked weight. Geolocation features and check values ensure that the driver is at the right site and collecting the right booking. This all speeds up operations at the site, leading to drivers spending less time waiting around and allowing the site operators to service more trucks each day.
Fertbook check-in signage at a distribution site in Geelong
We started by building a unified HTTP API capable of supporting any kind of client software. This is what all of the applications will reach out to in order to orchestrate the transactions.
By building a mobile app using React Native we were able to target the broadest range of users from a single codebase, without needing to spend the tremendous development time that would be required to separately build and maintain both a native Android app and a native iOS app. We were able to easily utilise operating system features to include things such as geolocation and rotation control, and optimise the UI for the touch-screen experience that Wengfu Australia’s sales team and rural customers would need on the road and on the farm.
For the rest, there’s the React web app, optimised for maximum productivity of desk-based users. Power users will be thrilled by the fine-grained controls offered here and the ability to breeze through multiple workflows in parallel.
Wengfu Australia runs its business using an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software system. This is the source of truth for accounting, invoices, stock-keeping, etc. and that was not going to change. This meant that any system we built was going to use the ERP system as the backing data store. However, due to the huge scale and overhead of the ERP platform, both read and writes to the ERP can be slow - sometimes 5 to 10 seconds to load a single record. The existing self-service interface could at times be an unpleasant experience. The new customer portal would have a strict requirement to eliminate such extreme delays.
By using a clever combination of caching and event-driven synchronisation, users can enjoy a fast and responsive user interface through Fertbook. It feels as if you’re interacting with the ERP system in real time, but without all of the delays. We successfully reduced page load times from 5 seconds to ~150ms at worst.
Fertbook was designed to be cloud-native on Microsoft Azure. Azure offered the best balance of functionality to cost for the features we needed, and as Wengfu Australia and many of their clients are already “Microsoft shops” this was the most comfortable option. By being cloud-native we spend significantly less time worrying about managing hardware, operating systems, OS processes, updates, patches, etc, and can spend more time building great features. We can also flexibly provision more or fewer resources depending on the customer load, saving unnecessary costs and ensuring customers always experience top performance. Fertbook is carefully designed to scale across as many physical machines as are required to support the customer load of the moment.
All of the backend components of Fertbook are deployed using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), specifically Bicep. Through this we can ensure that our deployments are consistent and reproducible, and that infrastructure changes go through the same code review process as any other part of the software.
The CD process includes test environments and an automated testing suite. New features can be thoroughly tested in a fully-featured scale-model environment (even including the ERP system) before being approved to go to production.
This is all orchestrated using Azure DevOps pipelines, which are fantastically flexible and reliable. Azure DevOps allows us to build and run our test suites and environments inside of our private Azure network so that it can access test databases securely. Compared to other CD solutions, setup of these private test runners inside of Azure is a breeze with Azure DevOps.
Fertbook has been excellently received by Wengfu Australia’s staff and customers alike. It has made multiple appearances in Australia’s Rural Business Magazine.
Fertbook featured in Rural Business Magazine. Reproduced with permission.
Substantial Software’s ability to turn data and process into elegant and engaging work flow and UI solutions through both app and web has made it possible for us to plan out a multi-year roadmap with them to bring out our companies best, and to continue blazing the way in automating and digitising bulk fertiliser sales and distribution in Australia.
— Stephen Luedi, Information Systems Manager at Wengfu Australia
If you want your customers or partners to engage deeply with your business through industry-leading online self-service, get in touch with us today.
