Barely five years old, Foodbex Global is already drawing in an annual revenue of more than S$30 million (US$17 million), registering some 100 staff on its payroll. The food and beverage distributor's customers include hotels, restaurants and, not least, the United States Navy. During its time, Foodbex has weathered the dot-com implosion, risen above dire economic conditions, and shrugged off the triple threats of the avian flu, mad cow disease and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

These days, the 500-pound gorilla in its field continues to gobble up old economy rivals, while spawning subsidiaries to expand its offerings. Co-founder Shahrin Bin Surif declares that the company wants to "grow exponentially, not organically".

At the heart of this success is www.foodbex.com, a virtual supermarket for restaurant and hotel managers to pick out food items from a list of over 10,000. They log in, make their selections, and their orders are delivered on the same day or the next.

According to Shahrin, this idea was spawned from his experiences as the owner of a food and beverage outlet.

The 32-year-old serial entrepreneur, together with a few friends, was peddling pricey coffee-makers as early as 1995, when the first stirrings of the gourmet java wave were being felt. He also set up a restaurant-cum-café-cum-bar in 1998, a short-lived venture that was to prove invaluable in the setting up of Foodbex.

"Without a system, I would probably need 50 people to process all the orders. But with a system, I don't care." Shahrin Bin Surif, co-founder, Foodbex Global

"We discovered that as an F&B business owner, you needed to interact with a lot of different suppliers with wide-ranging credit and payment terms and specifications," he recounts. "If you are not the chef in the operation, you are at the mercy of your chef in terms of prices."

"So to have more control and visibility in such a business, we thought it would be a good idea to have a one-stop food and beverage supplier that provided transparency to the whole procurement process," he continues.

With Foodbex, buyers can find out the exact costs of their food, and who the suppliers are, says Shahrin. They can also simplify their accounting systems.

For restaurant owners, the online procurement process appears straightforward enough, comprising some keystrokes and mouse-clicks. But this simplicity belies the complex processes lurking just beneath the surface. Even the largest food orders are processed and consolidated within the hour. The right batches of products are selected in order of expiry date, and from the right warehouse. Complex algorithms are used to decide whether, for example, a carton of chicken wings is delivered using the minivan or the freezer truck. Invoices have to be generated. Stocks have to be replenished.

To accomplish all that, the company adopted enterprise resource planning software Axapta--now owned by Microsoft--in 2000. It was, according to Shahrin, useful at first, but burgeoning demand prompted Foodbex to splash out over S$1 million (US$0.58m) on an Oracle solution the very next year.

Today, the Oracle 11i Process Manufacturing suite remains as invaluable as before.

"Without a system, I would probably need 50 people to process all the orders," he says. "But with a system, I don't care. The computer is doing all the work for me."

Foodbex has just two people administering the system now.

"Technology allows you to really cut down on the manpower required," says Shahrin. "Because of that, I'm not afraid of going out there to get as many customers as I want; I'm not afraid of talking to as many suppliers as I want, because I know my system can handle it."

This thinking was vital to the company landing its most significant win to date--a five-year, US$30 million deal in 2003 to supply and distribute food to the US Navy in two geographic areas.

"One of the reasons we got the contract was our technical capability. We scored very high on that," he explains. "We have a warehouse that can handle all the different types of products. We have a fully composite distribution system. And they were very, very comfortable with our e-procurement system."

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