Digital Wool Exchange Platform for Australian Industry

The AWI Wool Exchange Portal working group (WEP-WG) has endorsed the construction and implementation of a digital wool exchange platform for the long-term benefit of the Australian wool industry. The business case developed by the group has identified $38 million in consolidated industry benefits over the first 15 years of the digital selling platform.

WEP-WG chairman, Will Wilson has presented the group's findings to the AWI Board -the main recommendation being to move to the "discovery phase", where industry moves to build the portal.

The WEP will deliver greater pricing efficiency and increased competition within the wool selling system as well as provide all industry participants with a one stop port where all buying and selling options can be transparently evaluated and future price realisation mechanisms can be accommodated and made available.

The WEP-WG has proposed to engage current online commodity market operators to help develop the WEP and has already received proposals from 10 potential vendors. This allows industry to target specialty service providers to best fit the various offerings that WEP will aim to provide. It will also be a more cost effective use of funds and reduce the likelihood of duplication where certain software may already exist.

WEP-WG members have long been engaged in consultation, discussion and consensus on the initiative. The industry and stakeholder consultation with the WEP began in 2014 and has a significant number of meetings, discussions and publications.

A subset of the WEP-WG is likely to remain intact to act as a steering committee to provide direction to an internal WEP project team. During this phase the project team will work with the selected vendor to generate detailed functional requirements specification (utilising user sceanarios / stories), detailed solution architecture (including data integration requirements), detailed integrated implementation roadmap including finalised resource plan, and operating model design and strategy (including decisions regarding the commercials to access the required historical and current data) to be defined.

The team will also change management strategy and deployment plan.