Silver Fern Farms Case Study

Pastures to Platforms: Nurturing employees with new HR Tech

In the heart of New Zealand’s lush pastures, big plans are underway. Silver Fern Farms, New Zealand’s leading sustainable grass-fed meat producer, is not just aiming for local growth and global expansion, but they’re also seeking to transform their people experience.

In their mission to transform, Silver Fern Farms has partnered with Oracle Cloud HCM and Pinpoint HRM. By unifying processes in a modern integrated platform, Silver Fern Farms are elevating the employee experience and paving the way for the company’s continuous growth and success.

Founded in 1948, Silver Fern Farms is a pioneer of New Zealand’s meat industry. With the purpose of ‘Creating Goodness from the Farms the World Needs’, Silver Fern Farms processes and exports 100% grass-fed meat, worth approximately US$3 billion annually, to over 60 countries. With a now 6,500 strong global workforce, they knew they needed to sharpen their people processes and systems to better support and engage their highly valued people.

“Our previous tools were aged, homegrown and stand alone. They weren’t integrated, in fact many were not accessible unless on location. This used a lot of time and resource for administration in payroll, recruitment and talent development making reporting and tracking difficult,” says Matt Carter, Silver Fern Farm’s Chief People Officer.

“Our People team spent a significant amount of time in data verifying and managing rather than engaging with employees and helping them build their skill sets and to improve their contribution to and impact on the business.”

Silver Fern Farms saw the need for a contemporary HR tech platform that would give their employees easy access to shared information, no matter where they were located. They sought a system that would let their leaders and People teams effectively engage with employees to help them broaden their skills and advance their careers.

“We were looking for a solution that would provide us with one source of the truth, which was easily accessible, provided a consistent experience for all our people, and that make the work lives of leaders easier.”

Oracle and Pinpoint partner to deliver on priority business outcomes

Seeking a ‘best in class’ solution, they chose Oracle Cloud HCM and partnered with Pinpoint HRM for the implementation. With Pinpoint’s guidance, they embarked on a two-year journey of transformation.

Reflecting on the partnership, Carter says, “Pinpoint has been a steadfast ally. They worked seamlessly with the Silver Fern Farms team, guiding us through key business processes and genuinely partnering with our team through each phase of the project.”

“Their unique and tailored change communication collateral was instrumental in the initial phases of driving our rollout and adoption, and their commitment to our success has been unwavering.”

And the results to date?

Using Oracle HCM, Silver Fern Farms people processes have markedly shifted from deeply antiquated and risky processes into a package of contemporary and scalable approaches. Silver Fern Farms has now streamlined HR processes for recruitment, talent management from application to exit, and integrated these with payroll. Teams are collaborating more effectively, making faster decisions and the business can more easily launch innovative employee development initiatives.

“With New Zealand’s agriculture sector currently experiencing one of the highest labor shortages in its history, streamlining our people processes enabled us to better support employees and to make processes as smooth and user friendly has been crucial for us. We’ve improved the tools that our leaders use for talent identification, internal succession planning, delivering learning opportunities and tracking real-time feedback.” added Carter.

Silver Fern Farms have also:

Significantly reduced the manual administration time by 60% required for the Annual Remuneration Review
Increased the average goals per person for Impact & Development from 3.6 to 6.2
Had 6054 individual learning enrolments for online modules

Along with the alignment and development of people resources, Oracle Cloud HCM also provided the scalability and real-time data needed to support informed decisions.

Thoughts on Pinpoint HRM?

As Silver Fern Farms continues to aspire for a ‘best in class platform’, Pinpoint remains committed to collaborating and enabling that goal. This partnership and phase of the program are multifaceted, encompassing:

the development and execution of their HR technology roadmap
refinement of the Business as Usual (BAU) support model, and
optimisation of the current Oracle Cloud HCM platform.

Pinpoint are continuing to help introduce new features and functionalities to Silver Fern Farms, such as the rollout of Oracle Learning Cloud to their operational workforce and integration of innovative solutions like Oracle Digital Assistants.