Bord Bia
Bord Bia (The Irish Food Board) – Case Study
Bord Bia launches new innovative online portals with Parity
Bord Bia/Irish Food Board plans to use the web as a major communications platform to help disseminate a range of market information and industry services to the country’s manufacturers and producers of food and drink.
Working with Parity, the Irish Food Board (Bord Bia) is creating three major online portals so industry representatives can efficiently retrieve information on a self-service basis at any time of the day or night.
There will be an Extranet which will focus on providing resources to major Irish food and drink manufacturers such as Anglo Irish Beef Processors and Glanbia; an internally-focused portal for Bord Bia employees, and a new dedicated producers’ portal targeted at Ireland’s livestock producers of cattle, pigs and sheep.
Market reports
The Extranet will provide online access to industry reports and useful resources such as electronic newsletters. Users will be able to subscribe to these and discussion forums where they can swap notes with their peers.
Parity has also created secure online transactional payment purchasing facilities for pay-to-view documents.
EAlerts/Newsletters
The new portal’s users can directly subscribe to eAlerts on a range of topics from organics to food service. The user will get an email with abstracts of new stories posted to the site together with links to the full story which they can invoke if it is of relevance to them.
Reviews
The enterprise portal offers Irish producers and manufacturers clear options to read online reviews of conferences and research reports published by international market research organisations.
Personalised home pages to reflect user profiles
Users of the new enterprise portal will be able to set their own preferences in their user profiles. When a user logs onto the enterprise portal, it presents those documents that match their preferences in terms of sector, channel and geographic interests.
Peer-to-peer industry discussion groups
Online discussion forums are being made available covering matters such as distribution issues or developing manufacturer brands.
Ciaran Catney, Parity's project manager says,
The online discussion forums will be set up and maintained by Bord Bia moderators. They can send email campaigns targeted at specific industry groups to alert them to the issues being discussed on the web.
Tracking queries
Users can also request information from Bord Bia and track the status of their requests.
The Producer Portal – conduct your own analysis
The subscribers to Bord Bia’s producers portal will be able to easily access news items relating to their own specific industry and will be able to quickly run their own queries against industry-related data. For example Irish farmers will be able to plot historic prices of meat in various countries over a period of months.
Catney continues.
The employee portal - Document production
The Bord Bia employee portal will provide an inwardly-facing application which offers a centralised means of communicating and managing documents. This internal portal is set to become the focal point for maintaining all of Bord Bia’s published documentation and is being designed so employees will be able to easily browse and search through the available online resources.
Innovative technology integration
To bring this project to fruition, Parity is working with a group of technologies including Microsoft SharePoint (document management); Microsoft CMS (Content Management Server) and Pivotal (CRM).
These technologies, which are commonly known within the IT industry, have all been integrated to support the workings of the new portals. “It is very innovative. It makes for a smoother, seamless more holistic system for the Irish Food Board. It’s easier to use and quite different to what it would be like if you had three separate stand-alone applications,” Catney says.
The new technology solutions will enable Bord Bia’s employees to use their internal portal to define online a specific workflow process governing a set of documents so they can clearly establish and control any editing and publishing procedures that take place. It also puts Web publishing as a facility to suitable staff with no ‘webmaster’ needed to intervene – because of the integration of SharePoint and CMS.
Easier document searching and storage
Catney explains,
“The Irish Food Board is providing an extensive online self-service facility. Representatives from Ireland’s food and drinks industry will be able to easily explore the portals rather than ringing them up. It’s a far better and efficient way to disseminate important information.”
Julian Smith, Information Service manager at Bord Bia said:
