New Kiwi agent in Australia finds greener grass

The grass is always greener…. in New Zealand,but not for PGG Wrightson, a Kiwi company that has now started a livestock business in Australia.

Following the success of PGG Wrighton Real Estate Australia, the company has now added dairy livestock marketing to it’s offering, choosing Aussie livestock agency software supplier MYCO Systems as a critical supply partner.

General Manager Livestock, Nigel Thorpe said “We started with NZ dairy farmers in Victoria, utilizing our NZ relationships and that worked very well, so expanding our offering to include dairy livestock marketing was a natural linkage or synergy with the real estate business.”

Capitalising on already established infrastructure the livestock business started in April, now employs 8 Dairy Livestock Representatives throughout Victoria, South Australia and administration staff based in Melbourne.

Getting up to speed quickly was critical, so MYCO Systems was selected to provide its newest browser based livestock agency software called SaleG8 (pronounced as sale gate), for PGG Wrightson in Australia.

“We already have a good relationship with MYCO as they have looked after us in New Zealand for several years.  They had the ability to provide rapid deployment with technologically advanced software that gives us an advantage over our competitors.”

MYCO Systems has been providing livestock software to agents since 1991.  It was the first company to introduce livestock agents to Windows compatible systems and it has again lead this year with it’s browser based application Sale G8.

Myco Systems Company Director Andrew Lombe said the challenge was to provide mobile computing to PGG Wrightson’s eight travelling regional agents. “Using the internet makes this very easy,” he said. As the leading livestock software supplier in Australia, MYCO has invested several hundred thousand dollars and three years of research and development into completely redeveloping its agency software which PGG Wrightson adopted.

The software system provides front end information tools for representatives linked with back office processing and administration. “MYCO knows the livestock agency business inside out, their software met our business requirements and they were willing to run with some pretty tough timeframes on delivery,” Mr Thorpe said.

And is the grass greener?  Mr Thorpe says so far the venture has been a very positive move for parent company, PGG Wrightson Ltd in New Zealand. “It’s early days and bringing a team together in a short space of time has been hard but we are happy with progress,” he said.