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Farm Credit Canada could foresee a number of benefits when it rolled out a new customer relationship management system this past spring, but there was one that it couldn't have predicted.

That one involved the surprise financial crisis created for cattle farmers by the mad cow scare and subsequent loss of export markets. The new Enterprise CRM 8.8 system from PeopleSoft Canada came just in time to give the organization a much-needed turn of speed in dealing with the suddenly straitened circumstances of an alarming number of its customers.

Farm Credit Canada, a financially self-sustainable federal Crown corporation, is Canada's largest provider of financial and business services to agriculture and agribusiness. It has a loan portfolio of well over $10-billion.

The growing complexity of its operation — multiple lines of business and a rapidly changing customer base spread across the map of Canada — provided the impetus for the move toward state-of-the art CRM, says Derwin Arnstead, the director of market development who steered the project through all its phases.

The aim was to connect Farm Credit Canada's 1,000 staff members to its 50,000 customers and loan portfolio via instantly available snapshots of outstanding loans. With PeopleSoft system, FCC users can now drill down into customer portfolio details including balances, value, performance and interactions brought forward from multiple back office systems.

Dubbed Amigo within FCC, the system proved in its earliest days to be a friend indeed to at least some of the farmers dealing with the financial fallout from mad cow disease — bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

"We tell farmers: 'We're here in good times and in bad,'" Mr. Arnstead says. "When BSE hit, of course we realized that it could have a major income impact on our beef customers.

"So we used the new CRM application to find the customers in that group," he said. "We proactively contacted them and invited them to come in, or in some cases we went out to their farms and explored the options where we could be of assistance — defer their payments, arrange for them to pay only interest for a while — just contribute something to their operation right away, when they needed it."

Pre-CRM, the corporation could have accomplished something similar, but only after the time-consuming effort of pulling together data on each loan from various sources.

"Now we can find it all in one spot, print it off and take it with us, Mr. Arnstead says. "It's all on one page."

The need for technology to provide this holistic view has grown more apparent with the evolution of FCC's business in recent years.

"Our customer base is really changing," Mr. Arnstead says. "We've been around since 1959, most of that time as an agricultural lender to farmers. But our customer base is getting more varied. Business lines have expanded into vineyards, aquaculture, forestry. We're lending to these agribusiness clients, which require a different skill set. In primary production, the number of farms is decreasing, but the remaining ones are much bigger and more complex. We have to understand all these businesses."

Providing consistent service to these far-flung and diverse clients is FCC's principal challenge, and a key part of the solution is proving to be the CRM system's multiple channels for information: account managers in regional offices, customer service phone-in centres, e-business applications and alliance partners such as credit unions. Each can know instantly what has transpired anywhere in the system.

"That was our big win,' Mr. Arnstead says. "Having all that information in one place."

FCC began planning the CRM implementation early in 2002, choosing PeopleSoft's Enterprise CRM 8.8 later that year, testing integration with existing systems in 2003 and finally converting data from two back-end systems early this year.

All users were trained and on board by this past March.

Mr. Arnstead is now watching closely as PeopleSoft's takeover by Oracle Corp. unfolds — encouraged, he says, by Oracle's pledge of continued support under the new regime.

"It adds an element of uncertainty," he says, but notes that Oracle has indicated that it plans to enhance PeopleSoft products and offer support for 10 years.