Cloud workforce management delivers for NZ ag producer

Sustainable grass-fed meat processor Silver Fern Farms (SFF) has selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) to help deliver its people strategy and improve employee experience.

Deployment of the platform allows the NZ company to streamline HR processes including recruitment, talent management and workforce management, so the teams can collaborate more effectively and make faster decisions.

Founded in 1948, SFF is a cornerstone of New Zealand’s meat industry. With the purpose of creating goodness from the farms the world needs, SFF processes and exports 100% grass-fed meat, worth US$2 billion annually, to more than 60 countries. It employs more than 7000 people across New Zealand and internationally.

The company has plans for future growth and wants to ensure its HR processes deliver the most effective employee experience to workers throughout their careers. To do so, it needed a modern, unified platform that gave employees access to shared information across different locations and also enabled management and HR to more efficiently engage with employees to help them upskill and expand career development opportunities.

“Previously we were operating a suite of disparate homegrown tools that did not integrate with other systems, which meant payroll, recruitment and talent development required high levels of manual intervention,” said Matt Ballard, chief people officer, Silver Fern Farms.

“To avoid human errors, our HR team spent a significant amount of time in data verifying and managing rather than engaging with employees and helping them enhance their performance. To deliver more employee development initiatives, our teams needed to collaborate more effectively and make decisions faster. Oracle Cloud HCM’s capabilities provided us with a central repository that allowed our employees and leaders to easily access information while reducing the time spent on manual intervention.

“With New Zealand’s agriculture sector currently experiencing one of the highest labour shortages in its history, streamlining our people processes enabled us to better support employees across our network of production sites, supply and corporate functions by improving the tools that our leaders use including for talent identification, internal succession planning and real-time coaching and feedback,” Ballard said.

Oracle Cloud HCM has enabled the SFF team to streamline and reduce its annual review cycle of workforce remuneration from several weeks down to 10 days, while allowing multiple compensation processes to be handled simultaneously. At the same time, the organisation has improved employee engagement by more than 60%. This year, it has seen 74% uptake on its employee goal platform, a significant improvement over the previous system which was used by less than 10% of employees.

Along with the alignment and development of people resources, Oracle Cloud HCM also provided the scalability and real-time data needed to support informed business and leadership decisions. This enabled the company to implement the best HR practices in a standardised and efficient manner.

“Silver Fern Farms has brought together its HR function into a modern platform, which will lay a solid foundation for aligning and building its people resources and supporting its journey to becoming the world’s most successful and sustainable red-meat company,” said Scott Gledhill, Senior Director of Applications, Oracle Australia and New Zealand.

“We’ve seen demand for more customised and streamlined employee experiences increase over the past few years, so Oracle has been continually improving its Oracle Cloud HCM offering to include new tools such as Oracle Fusion Cloud Recruiting and Oracle Learning.”

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