Woolbroker computerisesrevolution in the wool store

Press, 11 October 1985, Page 24

Woolbroker computerises—revolution in the wool store

Extensive computerisation of stock records, growers’ advices and shipping movements has been adopted by the wool broker, Pyne, Gould, Guinness Ltd, the first New Zealand broker to print sale catalogues by computer. Buyers and visitors at the first Christchurch sale oi the season, on August 9, were offered by Pynes the first computer-generated catalogue. Computerisation of the company’s wool division has cost $280,000 and been less than one year in the planning and execution but it is already obvious that it has revolutionised the work oi the Christchurch and Timaru offices, said the wool manager, Mr John Devine.

Pynes has led the way into computerisation for New Zealand wool brokers by taking software from the Talman Pty Ltd, company in Australia and running it on Datapoint 8600 hardware which is also linked to the Burroughs computer in the company’s Christchurch head office. The wool division has several input terminals scat-

tered throughout its stores and offices in Christchurch and Timaru. Bale weights, style descriptions, test results and eventually sale results are all fed in.

But it is possibly in the reclassing department (which handles all bin, group or machine blended bales) that the computerisation has had the most dramatic effect.

At any time, the P.G.G. store staff know exactly, to the kilogram, where all the wool from a grower’s consignment has been placed,

combined or blended. As wool is split away from the small consignments by the classers it is all weighed and put into the computer to the credit of the grower. Then when the firm’s group or bin lots are sold at auction each grower who contributed wool gets an exact account and credit. All this reclassing activity is in the name of sale efficiency — larger lots of more even wool — and is therefore holding down costs in the whole industry, to the benefit of growers who pay agency and now testing fees. The Pynes computerisation has also greatly increased efficiency at no extra cost to the growers. The move to fortnightly sales in the Christchurch centre increased the pressure on brokers and they are all moving quickly to computerisation, the last major group in the wool industry beyond the farm gate to do so. “It would be a mammoth job to cope with fortnightly sales without this computerisation,” said Mr Devine. “Now the day after the sale we have account sales notices to growers and purchase summaries out to buyers.” The computerisation has certainly generated a greater flow of information to growers and the Talman programme holds the promise of even more.

Growers now get a notice of wool received into the store, a core and weight summary and a sale date advice before the auction, all generated by the computer. They then get an account sale advice with a summary of the greasy and

clean prices, a clip analysis and a bulk class and blend analysis. A summary of the grower’s returns go to the P.G.G. head office computer where either the cheques are made out by the prompt date or the currect account is credited.

As computerisation spreads throughout the industry, speeding the flow of information, prompt dates may move forward from the present 17 days. But this will depend mostly on the willingness of wool exporters to pay earlier. The P.G.G. wool office staff also feed in test certificate results to add to the dossier of style and weight information being kept on each grower’s bale or re-

classed wool. It is expected that the test results will soon be available from Wool Testing Services and the Wool Testing Authority on-line into the P.G.G. computer, perhaps through a clearing house system that the exporters and the testing houses are investigating with Talman.

Talman runs such a clearing house of computer stored and accessible physical (not financial) information in Australia for the whole industry. When the Pyne’s wool division decided to take a Talman system Mr Maurice Bellamy and Mr Terry Way, of the Christchurch office, went to Brisbane to view computerisation in a

broker’s office. At Dalgety Bennetts Farmers, of Brisbane, a Talman system had been operating for about a year. Because length and strength testing are now offered in Australia, computerised auctions are also under way. Mr Bellamy was impressed by the amount of information the Australian system generates for the farmer. With the simple addition of the numbers of sheep shorn on the transport advice which accompanies the bales into the store, the computer can now feed back to the grower average fleece weights, gross wool value per head and sale result comparisons with previous years. A market summary is also sent out

with the account sales notice. After the Pyne’s executives returned to New Zealand it was about two months before the Talman system was up and running in Moorhouse Avenue.

Talman Pty Ltd, is no stranger to the New Zealand wool industry, having installed some of its systems in exporters’ offices. The company has reportedly struck a rich vein of contracts for software in the wool industries of both countries and it specialises in this field.

Pyne, Gould, Guinness has also installed two new automatic bale sample and core machines at Moorhouse Avenue and in Timaru. These hydraulically and pneumatically driven machines are worth $90,000 each and are constructed to perform the 1.W.T.0. defined sampling procedures by a small Upper Hutt engineering firm run by ex-wool store employees. As the main lines of growers’ wool come into store the first stage of processing is now the automatic sampler, corer and weigher. Bales are no longer weighed on arrival in this “main line” section, only in the reclassing section.

The new machine automatically weighs and takes the grab samples for saleroom display, a minimum of 4kg from each lot. It then shunts the bales along to the core sampler where the much smaller samples for yield, thickness and colour testing are taken. Weights are entered into computer terminals at this machine and eventually style descriptions will be added here also.