Perth Market Authority - Case Study

The Perth Market Authority (PMA), a Western Australian Government agency, is responsible for the ownership and management of Market City. The asset, developed in 1989, is situated on 50 hectares of land at Canning Vale, 16km south of the Perth CBD.

Situation
Market City plays a critical role in the marketing and distribution of fresh produce within the State. Over AUD$350 million worth of fresh produce is traded annually through the Central Trading Area (CTA) of the markets. In addition significant sales are carried out by tenants to the major supermarkets and through interstate and international trade.

The PMA provides services to roughly 25 agents that trade in fruit and vegetables and the statistical information on these trades was minimal. They needed to capture a lot more detail as to what was coming in and out of the market.

Objectives
PMA Chief Executive Officer, Mike Donnelly said that Market City had specific requirements they aimed to achieve including increased accuracy, automation, uniformed controlling methods, improved usage and user-friendly reporting.

“Our primary concern was to increase the accuracy of throughput data across all agents. We also knew that automating our data entry would reduce manual labour so that was essential too.”

Together with RDA Group Managing Director Ian Cook, Mr Donnelly and agent representatives, RDA Senior Analyst Programmer Michael Dorrington considered the options that would accommodate a central method for controlling product codes, containers and regional data in order to satisfy other important project objectives. Additionally they wanted an improved data approval and validation system.

Action
With a thorough situation and objective analysis, RDA Group worked alongside the PMA and involved parties to propose a solution to collect data from each of the agents on a regular basis and house it in a central database for complex reporting.

“To achieve this, a market-wide set of standards, such as produce codes, containers and tonnage conversion factors, were provided via authenticated XML to each of the agents”, said Mr Dorrington.

“Using these standards, the agent's then pass back their compliant data including produce, container and region codes, and tonnage information. This is then uplifted into the central database and reports are made available to subscribed members and to the Market Authority themselves.”

The solution comprises of PHP, XML, CSV and MySQL technologies and is served up from a Linux platform which is also managed by RDA Group.

Outcome
Despite some minor issues during implementation stages, mainly due to underestimating the full scope and intricacies of the project, PMA considers the overall solution to be incredibly successful.

“Capturing that depth of information is groundbreaking and we had very few teething problems along the way”, said Mr Donnelly. 

“During the life of the project we found the RDA team to be very professional.”

The program has now been running for 18 months, has 3.4 million transaction records and to date is considered to be successful by all stakeholders. Mr Donnelly can clearly see the differences it has meant to the business operations.

“So far I can see that the data has remained completely accurate and we’ve had very little downtime. We can now view informative reports with a great ‘first glance’ value of summarised data, which has enormous benefits for the agents and admin staff.”