Before, purchase orders would be initiated, processed and paid through the individual plants. Each plant used its own coding approach, product number system and so on, and that information would sit there in a silo.

When you start tying all these systems together, it becomes a chain, and there's always the chance you'll have weak links. What happens, for example, when you rely on an application that feeds the shop floor system the bit of information you're looking for and that application fails?

We weren't in the position to make the investment needed for a single-instance ERP system. You can always spend $2 or $3 million on software, and sometimes you get the benefit, sometimes you don't. We were looking for a low-cost integration strategy we could reuse for a number of different e-business objectives.

Our objective was to unify the data and come up with one way to perform the process rather than 12.

There are only about 4,000 marine-plant species compared with an estimated 250,000 species of terrestrial green plants. Similarly, of the 1.7 million-or-so known animal species, only about one-tenth are from oceans, with most of these living on or close to the bottom in relatively shallow water.

The plants are in a weakened state. Moisture is the key. We need rain.