Automating Supply Chains with API

Agrocorp sells food products at scale. It has an annual turnover of USD 3.3 billion, and customers in more than 50 countries. It partners with over 4,000 farmers and sells foodstuffs like rice, pulses and plant-based proteins to leading food processors and wholesalers across the world.

Its supply chain operations are invariably complex. Documentation is a vital control mechanism to ensure the safety and quality of the product, but paper-based documents can be lost or damaged causing delays. This could be disastrous for a perishable commodity.

Agrocorp was therefore looking to develop its own digital platform to meet two important goals.

The first was to eliminate paper from the supply chain, eradicating the risks and costs of paper documents.

The second was to improve the ability to track products through the supply chain, from a specific farmer or grower through all the intermediate handlers and carriers, to the end customer.

Traceability is very important to Agrocorp’s clients, who want to know that the commodities they are buying have been produced sustainably and handled correctly at each stage in the journey.

Agrocorp approached us to help and together with a blockchain provider, Distributed Ledger Technologies, we built a global trade system for agro-commodities that covers the entire supply chain.

In this new system, paper contracts have been replaced by digital agreements. Each counterparty can upload and view trade documents and any changes must be validated by all the counterparties.

Thanks to the new platform, any counterparty can trace commodities along the supply chain. With digital documentation, the secure transfer of goods has become more streamlined and Agrocorp’s working capital cycle has been reduced by an average of 20 days.

We also integrated our banking API solution, DBS RAPID, (Real-time APIs with DBS) into the new system. These APIs connect our banking services directly into Agrocorp’s own operations, allowing agreed banking transactions to be performed automatically in real-time.

Certain events, such as confirmation that goods have been shipped, automatically trigger instructions to us through the integrated APIs, to release funds, minimising manual intervention and speeding up payments.

Agrocorp has described this solution as a “gamechanger”. With the platform and integrated APIs already implemented in Australia, the firm is starting to deploy it across its entire network.
Many organisations face challenges similar to Agrocorp, such as the need to eliminate errors, speed up transactions and reduce costs related to manual processes. If you are dealing with similar challenges, DBS RAPID can help. We are a leader in the provision of banking API solutions with more than 200 customers and the largest banking API library in the world.