Silver Fern Farms, New Zealand’s largest sustainable meat processor, has chosen Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) to help deliver its people strategy and improve the employee experience by empowering and upskilling staff. With Oracle Cloud HCM, Silver Fern Farms can streamline HR processes, including recruitment, talent management, and workforce management, allowing teams to collaborate more effectively and make faster decisions.
Founded in 1948, Silver Fern Farms is a cornerstone of New Zealand’s meat industry, processing and exporting 100% grass-fed meat, worth US$2 billion annually, to over 60 countries. The company has over 7,000 employees globally and plans for future growth, which requires HR processes that deliver the most effective employee experience to workers throughout their careers.
“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 at 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. 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.”
Oracle Cloud HCM has enabled Silver Fern Farms to streamline and reduce its annual review cycle of workforce remuneration from several weeks to just 10 days, while improving employee engagement by over 60%. The company has seen 74% uptake on its employee goal platform this year, a significant improvement over the previous system used by less than 10% of employees.
“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 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,” added Ballard.
Along with the alignment and development of people resources, Oracle Cloud HCM has provided the scalability and real-time data needed to support informed business and leadership decisions. This has enabled the company to implement the best HR practices in a standardized 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 customized 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.”
