Maple Leaf Farms Heralds EXTOL for B2B Connections
June 19, 2007 Alex Woodie
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Maple Leaf Farms, the duck farm that was founded in 1958, may a bit old fashioned when it comes to duck recipes. But when it comes to back-office computer systems and B2B connectivity, the Milford, Indiana, company is on the cutting edge, and it gives its B2B software supplier, EXTOL International, much of the credit. With 1,200 employees working together to sell 16 million ducks per year in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Asia, Maple Leaf Farms has cornered a pretty good chunk of the market for ducks and duck products. Assisting the company in its quest to sell more ducks is VAI‘s S2K ERP suite running on an IBM iSeries Model 810 server. Before Maple Leaf Farms tapped EXTOL for EDI and B2B software, managing EDI communications with about 100 trading partners took half the time of Ted Gillem, the company’s application support specialist and EDI coordinator. Since then, the company has implemented several EXTOL products–including the EXTOL Integrator, Secure, and Portal products–which has boosted automation and reduced the amount of time Gillem spends managing EDI. “One of our larger retail customers told me Maple Leaf Farms is ‘light years ahead’ of their other suppliers when it comes to EDI,” Gillem says. “This is because we use EXTOL for business integration.”
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