Engineering the digital products one of the UK and Ireland’s largest agri-businesses runs on

The problem

As the Fane Valley Group expanded across divisions, brands and locations, the operational complexity of the business increased with it.

Different parts of the group relied on separate systems, disconnected customer data and operational processes that were still heavily manual. Store operations depended on paper based workflows for stock management, replenishment and agronomy order processing. Sales teams had no unified view of the customer across divisions, while key operational processes like livestock tagging remained compliance critical and entirely paper driven.

At the same time, customer expectations were changing. Agricultural customers increasingly expected self service, e-commerce capability and faster access to information, while the business itself needed systems that could scale and evolve alongside continued growth across the group.

The challenge wasn't replacing a single platform or digitising one process. It was how to continuously engineer and evolve the connected operational products the business depends on every day, across commerce, supply chain, sales operations and field workflows - without disrupting the day to day running of a large, complex agri-business.

What we built

Over a 20+ year partnership, GCD has designed and engineered a wide range of digital products and operational systems across the Fane Valley Group. Each built around a specific operational or commercial challenge. Each designed to connect into the wider business ecosystem and evolve alongside the organisation over time.

EDGE: Stock forecasting, replenishment and agronomy order processing

At the centre of Fane Valley’s store and supply chain operations is EDGE - a bespoke operational platform engineered to replace manual stock management processes across the stores retail network.

The platform manages stock forecasting replenishment and agronomy order processing - helping store teams manage inventory more efficiently and accurately.

Sales rep portal

With multiple divisions running separate ERP systems, Fane Valley’s sales teams had no unified view of the customer. The cloud based sales portal consolidates those systems into a real time single operational view - giving sales representatives access to account information, orders, balances, invoices and customer history across every division. Allowing them to focus on managing the customer relationships and success.

The platform gives credit control teams full visibility across customer accounts, significantly reduces the manual administration associated with disconnected systems and helps reduce ageing accounts across the business.

E-commerce platform: Fane Valley Stores

We engineered a custom e-commerce platform designed specifically around the needs of agricultural customers - creating a modern self-service buying experience fully integrated with Fane Valley’s operational and stock management systems. This includes demand management for seasonality of farm products. Ensuring the right products, in store, at the right time.

Agri-tagging ecosystem

Fane Valley processes livestock identification tag orders for farmers - supporting animal traceability and regulatory compliance across the agricultural sector.

To better support this service, we built a system that manages the entire livestock tagging process - from taking the order and obtaining regulatory approval, through to printing and encoding the tags - replacing what was previously a manual, paper-based operation.

The system is connected via API to government databases. Maintaining integrity of each tag and compliance.

Why it worked

It worked because the approach was never centred around isolated projects. It was built around a long term product partnership, focused on what the business needed next, not just what was needed today.

Each product reinforces the next. EDGE supports stock forecasting, replenishment and order processing across the store network. The sales portal connects customer and account data across divisions. The e-commerce platform gives customers a modern self-service buying experience. The tagging system replaced a compliance critical manual process with something reliable and scalable.

The result is a connected set of operational products that supports how one of the UK and Ireland's largest and most successful agri-businesses runs.