Silver Fern Farms, New Zealand’s largest exporter of beef, lamb and venison, turned to Datacom’s Foundry team to help the company better understand its supply chain and information flows, and to unlock hidden value in its own processes. Along the way, together we designed a better process for its farmer suppliers.

By working with key stakeholders across the supply chain, and using our ThinkSmash workshop to facilitate ideation, Silver Fern Farms was able to drill down into what information is needed, how best to extract it, and discover what will help suppliers and partners work better to deliver improved results.

As a result, Silver Fern Farms realised there was significant opportunity in a number of key areas:

  • Improvement in loyalty
  • Growth in market share
  • Improved quality and yields
  • Growth in livestock programmes
  • Improved cashflow.

Previously, disparate systems handling different components in various ways led to a poor user experience and a lot of manual intervention to keep items moving through any given workflow.

Silver Fern Farms’ clear challenge was to unlock value for all stakeholders through a digital transformation project that would build a single platform to handle everything through a single user interface. This enabled farmers, field reps and head office, among others, to access the information they needed in an easily understood format.

By working with our mobile innovation, integration and software teams, we built and deployed a new back office technology stack that could grow and develop as the company expands and changes. A new Silver Fern Farms ecosystem was born and is expected to deliver increased market share, reduced churn, improved quality and yield, and improved cashflow for farmers.

The front end of the ecosystem, the Silver Fern Farmer app, uses clear information design, so farmer suppliers can easily access the information they need, reducing the time they spend trying to access and understand key metrics, and allowing them to have full access to all the data insights and analytics they’ve never had before.

The supplier experience – a major driver of the programme – is proving to be a key asset for farmers and the start of a re-imagination of Silver Fern Farms’ supplier experience.

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