Agrium Inc. is a leading global producer and distributor of fertilizers and other agricultural products and services. They are one of the top two nitrogen producers in the world with approximately three percent of the nitrogen market.

The Corporation produces and markets four primary groups of fertilizers: nitrogen, phosphate, potash and sulphur. Agriumás twelve fertilizer plants are among the most modern and efficient in North America.

Agrium uses railcars, trucks, pipelines, barges, and lake vessels to transport fertilizer across its distribution network to roughly 10,000 customer locations. Intermediate distribution facilities include inland marine terminals, company-owned warehouses, leased-warehouses on long and short-term contracts, and rail sidings used for temporary in-transit storage.

Agrium wished to purchase computer software that would be used by managers and staff in the marketing, sales, transport, and distribution groups to optimize the sourcing of products to customers and the design of the fertilizer distribution network. The software had to be capable of optimizing large-scale multi-product distribution networks in which products could be sourced from a number of producing plants, ports, or other vendors, shipped by different modes of transport across a multi-echelon distribution network to thousands of customer locations.

The software was required to search out the most profitable or the most economical network flow or design subject to business policies, operating rules, capacity constraints on facilities and transportation lanes, and customer service requirements.

Agrium Inc. chose TechnoLogix and Opti-Net ™ for the development and implementation of its supply chain optimization system back in 2001. Since then the system has experienced a number of enhancements, including its integration with the corporate SAP ERP environment.

With the significant growth in overall volumes sold and the cost of transportation, the tool has served its users well in a variety of studies and reviews, including:

- Network Flow-Indicate by customer/destination and product, what the primary,
secondary and tertiary sourcing is assuming a fixed network
- Identify warehouse rationalization opportunities- Given the existing distribution
network, which warehouses are marginal or should be closed
- For a region, identify a series of hypothetical warehouses and decide among
existing and hypothetical warehouses what the optimal network design would be
- Being able to specify the minimum number of warehouses desired within that
region

The tool helped identify 3.3% in savings based on optimal vs actual 2007 production/distribution patterns, or almost CAD 4.0 per ton.