Global Food Exchange

Company: Context IntegrationCustomer: Global Food ExchangeSubmitted by: HotwirePRGlobal Food Exchange is the largest and most active business-to-business marketplace for the $800 billion global food trade. Founded in 1999, Global Food Exchange is setting the standard for trading and supply chain management in the food industry. Through superior technology and dedicated customer service, Global Food Exchange is bringing the efficiency of e-commerce to the large and fragmented global food industry while preserving and enhancing crucial personal relationships. A full service solution, Global Food Exchange connects buyers and sellers of high-value food products including: poultry, seafood, produce, meat, dairy and other perishable ingredients.

Business Challenge

With an outdated e-commerce platform and slow site traffic, Global Food Exchange needed assistance in evaluating its e-commerce strategy and application needs.

Global Food Exchange also wanted to maintain its competitive edge in the online food and beverage industry, which required a highly customized, efficient auction site.

Objectives

To make strategic recommendations regarding potential alternatives to the existing e-commerce platform based on supply chain and industry marketplace needs. To recommend applications and architecture based on the new site requirements. To connect buyers and sellers in a highly customized open global food marketplace, from purchase to order fulfillment.

Why Context?

“We selected Context Integration for this project because of the company’s deep technology and digital marketplace solutions expertise. Its reputation for building complex, reliable solutions that are designed to scale as traffic grows were crucial to our decision,” said Scott Overton, CTO, Global Food Exchange.

Technical Solution

Context Integration leveraged its deep technology expertise and extensive digital marketplace experiences to assist global food exchange in defining and strategizing detailed overall requirements and to recommend a more dynamic, digital marketplace, e-commerce channel. As partners, Context Integration and Ariba successfully implemented its fast track version of Ariba’s Marketplace 7.0 (formerly known as Tradex) The new site, which will be built and integrated with the Marketplace 7.0 application, is highly customized to increased customer relationship management while providing sophisticated e-commerce transaction capabilities.

Context Integration also utilized its proprietary solutions development and project management methodology, ContextWISE™, to ensure the delivery of scalable and reliable e-commerce solution.

Results

Global Food Exchange is pleased with the overall re-architecture and strategic direction of Context Integration’s recommendations. Using ContextWISE methodology, Context integration was able to deliver comprehensive requirements and fully integrated supply chain strategy for its new, highly customized and first-of-kind global exchange network to increase traffic and sales.