Iain Boyd, Head of ICT at beef and sheep producer ANZCO Foods, says the past 36 months has seen the company’s technology function “transform from a cost centre delivering little value to the business to an innovative and agile function used to differentiate and transform the business.”

A data-driven organisation

In support of the organisation’s sales and operations planning (S&OP), the technology team ramped up their capability, and together with the business designed, built, and implemented a modern predictive analytics platform. 

The immediate benefit was assisting the business to navigate the constraints in an export business during a pandemic with disrupted supply chains. 

Data is also being used to help the company track its impact on the environment. 

“As a business we have taken up the climate change challenge to help reduce our emissions footprint,” says Boyd. “As a start we needed to understand and capture our baseline data so that we knew what impact the wider ANZCO group was having on the environment. This kicked off a massive technology undertaking by upgrading and implementing the operational technology systems and hardware in order to be able to collect the necessary data.”

The team has recently gone live with site reporting, providing hourly updates to track water and energy use. 

“Data is an asset if used properly and implemented. A cross functional data governance group was established, and the changes implemented fostered knowledge sharing across the business but also made people aware of the security and privacy risks with the new legislation that was introduced,” adds Boyd.

Lifting cybersecurity capability

Another major area of focus has been ensuring the organisation’s cybersecurity capability and systems are modernised and ready to protect ANZCO, particularly given the increase in cyber-attacks at large meat processing companies overseas and in NZ.

The team deployed new systems to ensure IT and OT assets are secure and vulnerabilities in our business systems are managed. The team also worked on implementing a SOC (Security Operations Center) and SIEM (Security information and event management) with standard runbooks and security response plans for major events.

ANZCO’s technology team ensures that the systems are regularly scheduled for penetration testing and that networks are segmented to ensure resilience against attacks, according to Boyd. 

“User education plays a big part in stopping cyber criminals. Communication campaigns have been launched throughout the business to educate so our people don’t become victims of these attacks and ensure they keep their personal information private,” he adds.

Automation and innovative ways of working

Boyd credits the team’s approach of first thinking of the problem in a way the user experiences it, before finding a solution and implementing it. “By working closely with our people, we are able to share the vision and goals of the solution and how we would go about doing the change.”

They have invested in different tools such as robotic process automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the Microsoft Power platform to develop new ways of doing things. 

In one example, a documentation coordinator manually had to capture information and fill in a chamber of commerce form. This usually took a staff member about 45 minutes to complete per application and was fraught with the chance of data input errors due to the manual nature of filling in the forms. The solution that was implemented by the ANZCO tech team automated the process and reduced the time down to three minutes per application with significant benefits in the accuracy of the data. 

“By leveraging these tools, we can automate repetitive and mundane tasks, which enables people to focus on the more value added or important parts of their roles. This has had a positive effect where staff are more engaged due to enjoyment of the work they are doing,” says Boyd.