RD1 denies moving on from Oracle

By ADAM GIFFORD

New Zealand Dairy Group's RD1 subsidiary is looking at buying the Oracle 11i application suite to run its back office functions, despite rumours that its Oracle implementation is running into trouble.

Chief executive Neal Murphy denied that Oracle was about to be thrown out.

"The implementation has been long, complicated and extensive, and there are times when tempers have frayed, but we're working to a timetable and the timetable is being met."

Despite a release two months ago saying its on-line marketplace site (www.rd1.com) had been completed in 90 days, it has so far been available to only 300 farmers in Matamata, Te Awamutu and Southland who signed on as beta testers.

"We don't want people on the site who are not part of the trial," Mr Murphy said.

More farmers would be allowed on to the site in coming weeks, and it would be open for public access early next year.

"There have been a lot of the typical teething problems, such as the performance of the site on different browsers and concerns from far- flung rural areas on site performance, which is typically more about line performance than site performance," he said.

"A lot of our users are not regular users of the net, so they're being introduced to new technology."

RD1's six-month implementation process compares with rival Kiwi Dairy's Fencepost.com site, built with the New Zealand-developed Jade application tools, which went live in July, two months after building started.

Fencepost has already picked up 5000 registered users, including more than 3000 farmers, who use it to access supplier's statements, check the weather or quality of milk and discuss issues of concern.

Mr Murphy said there might be similar content on the two sites, but RD1.com was fundamentally different from Fencepost because it was a "clicks and mortar" transformation of the Dairy Group's AnchorMart chain of rural service stores.

"We are building a complicated internet store with thousands of SKUs [stock count units]," he said.

Fencepost was built for what used to be known as Kiwi Dairy's suppliers' services division, whose function is to communicate with shareholders and make sure the milk is picked up on time.

Mr Murphy said with the RD1 site almost complete, the company was planning for the next version, which could include non-Oracle software.

Rick Grocott, RD1's general manager IT, said the system being built now was always intended as an interim step.

"We went ahead with implementation of the RD1 infrastructure with AnchorMart's in-house back office suite, which covers accounts receivable, accounts payable, purchasing, order entry and so on.

"It was designed that way to minimise the impact on the bricks and mortar business, and to get over the period when the full suite of 11i applications was not available on our chosen platform."

It is likely non-Oracle software will be used for data warehousing, customer relationship management and other functions.

Oracle applications have tended to be closely linked to versions of the Oracle database, creating upgrade headaches for users.

Mr Grocott said RD1 was built using Oracle iStore, running on one version of the Oracle 8 database, and Oracle Portal (WebDB), running on another version of Oracle 8.

The site is hosted at the Dairy Group data centre at Anchor House in Hamilton on clustered Compaq Alpha servers running Tru-64 Unix.

RD1's back office suite runs on an Oracle 7.6 database.

"iStore 3, which is the version we are running at the moment, is designed to stand separately from the Oracle applications suite," Mr Grocott said.

The RD1 team has also been building ASB Bank services into the site, after the bank bought a 10 per cent interest in the company.