Buywayz

Business Profile.

The National Farmers' Association (NFA) was established in the Republic of Ireland in 1955. The Association presents a coherent national voice for its 85,000 members on all issues affecting their livelihoods. It represents the interests of farmers with government, agribusiness, financial and other influencer groups.

Solution Overview

Over 2,500 farmers use a procurement system that is powered by the VoiceVault Voice Verification Platform. A farmer's identity is verified over the phone using biometric voice verification. Voice verification is used to digitally sign orders and deduct funds from a farmer's bank account.

Value Generated

The system has cut procurement time from hours to seconds and uses a repeatable process that ensures optimal efficiencies for every supply order: sales people no longer visit farmers for repeat orders of necessary supplies.

Why the wisest farmers buy from Buywayz

Voice-verified telephone ordering system streamlines Irish farms supply chain

Back in the fifties, the Republic of Ireland had difficulty feeding its population. Farmers consumed over thirty per cent of their output feeding their own families. The country imported nearly 5,000 tonnes of butter as well as bacon and other products. Forty years later, a modern Irish farmer was feeding 45 to 50 people - a seven fold increase in productivity that has continued to this day. It achieved these considerable enhancements in productivity by embracing modern farming methods and through the acquisition of efficiencies across the entire supply chain.

Today, the Irish agriculture business is responsible for employing around seven per cent of the working age population and it generates 7.5 billion Euros a year. The Republic of Ireland is particularly well-known for its milk and beef.

Challenge: Embracing procurement efficiency

One of the key problems Irish farms face is adapting to the changing nature of the Irish agri-business. Farmers now face increasing pressures on the bottom line: the prices paid for their produce by retailers is under constant pressure while costs continue to rise. While farmers must simply manage many of the economic realities of modern business, there are areas where the achievement of efficiencies can drive down costs and improve margin. One area that was identified as a generator of significant business improvement was supplies procurement.

Pat Smith, Director of the Buywayz Project, explained: "Our members were spending enormous amounts of time on researching the best prices and subsequently with sales people to order what was essentially always going to be the same kinds of products. We realised that we could save farmers an enormous amount of time - and money - if we could automate the purchase of regular stock items to bring our members into the twenty-first century."

When Smith learned that 85% of Irish farmers owned a mobile phone, yet few, if any, owned a computer, he decided that a telephone ordering system would be the best way of ensuring maximum farmer participation. "Irish farmers just don't do the Internet," said Smith. "Yet, they are now technologically advanced in its broadest sense, so we decided that a new automated ordering system would provide the solution."

There were also additional challenges with securing payment for orders from farmers, so Smith wanted to link the ordering and financial processes to ensure efficient payment collection, minimise paperwork and eliminate the potential for bad debt.

VoiceVault provides the solution

Smith was introduced to the VoiceVault voice verification solution by Connected Communities, one of the Association's existing business suppliers. While he had not heard about voice verification, once it was explained to him, he realised that the ability to digitally sign a transaction with voice would overcome many of the potential obstacles to the system he was developing.

"Once we heard that VoiceVault could be linked directly to the Irish banking system, we were sold," said Smith. "This ability to use a voice to sign on the dotted line is extremely beneficial in an industry that has been dominated by paperwork and unnecessary bureaucracy."

VoiceVault is now used to verify the identity of the farmer placing an order and to digitally sign credit card payments. This unique voice verification technology uses spoken words to calculate a digital representation of the caller's vocal tract - referred to as a voiceprint. Sophisticated algorithms are used to compare a voiceprint previously generated at enrolment with a voiceprint generated at the time a farmer calls to place an order.

The Association is building a range of services to support the Irish farming community as it seeks to scale-up its operations. This platform, known as BuyWayz, is gradually becoming a one-stop-shop for the procurement of a wide range of goods and services. Many of Ireland's largest agricultural supplies companies now trade with farmers through the system, including: oil distributors, animal health products companies, crop protection product suppliers and other hardware organisations, such as fence-makers. The system has also been extended to other areas of procurement, including telecommunications and energy services.

While the Association runs and owns the system and charge farmers a small membership fee as well as deducting a small commission from completed orders, it is not a profit generating business. The system also holds detailed profiles of each customer and can therefore pump-out customised messages regarding particular offers that are available for suppliers on the system.

Buywayz in action

While the background voice verification process is complex, what the farmer hears is simple and straightforward. The process is fully automated and integrated with a voice response (IVR) system. The farmer is asked to speak a PIN number in the original sequence and then in reverse. The VoiceVault system uses the words spoken by the farmer to generate a voiceprint. This is compared with another that was generated when the farmer enrolled in the service. This combination of PIN and voice verification creates a strong two-factor authentication process.

Once identity is confirmed the system will ask the farmer to key in the item codes for the supplies to be purchased. Payment is authorised and the farmer's bank account is debited.

"The Buywayz system treats the farmer's voice as a digital signature and is the only authorisation required to confirm a financial transaction. This dramatically streamlines a procurement process that used to take hours or days into one that takes just seconds," said Smith. "The system is now managing high value transactions and is taking the procurement burden off farmers' shoulders. As an Association, we feel that the system is helping us to drive down our members' costs and enabling them to become more efficient."

Future plans

The current success of the Buywayz has encouraged the Association to consider widening its remit to include machinery spare parts and also overseas product suppliers. Smith and his team are also planning an imode service - procurement via the Web using a mobile phone.