Gundagai Meat Processors

The meat processing industry faces a higher cost to operate than other global competitors due to labour and regulatory costs, which creates a greater focus on operational efficiency and managing costs closely to generate more profit. This lead GMP to implement an expansion project with a significant investment in automation and the internet of things to create a data-rich environment. Soon after this, GMP realised that the investment in infrastructure and technology alone wasn’t enough. At the same time, the Red Meat Advisory Council (RMAC) released their ‘Red Meat 2030’ strategic outline and shared vision for the Australian red meat and livestock industries. The paper highlighted how the industry intends to achieve a new level of success by 2030, which is to double the value of red meat sales.

For GMP, they looked at the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that were critical to their efficiency and growth. The manual entering and collection of data from several different systems to assess KPIs was taking up time that would be better spent working on how to improve their KPIs. As mentioned earlier, the meat processing industry operates at a higher cost compared to other sectors. Absenteeism is a significant contributor and has a major effect on understanding the true cost of labour, making it difficult to forecast and minimise the impact on productivity.

Moreover, the industry drivers’ assessment was based on ‘gut feeling’ and subjective interpretation of the data, requiring further creation of reports to communicate these results. The time between collection, interpretation, reporting and decision-making meant any resulting action was taken well after an event occurred making it difficult to analyse and forecast quickly to minimise impact. Having the data available instantly with automatic visualisation of a KPI dashboard report has ensured the business is consistently operating on current, up-to-date information and improve efficiency in operations to achieve their own KPIs and the RMACs 2030 strategic vision.

With an established clear vision and a new set of priorities, the Red Meat Industry is facing challenges to improve productivity. At the core of this challenge, data is key. Toustone’s DI Platform delivers automated dashboard reporting based on current data. For GMP the automation of this process improved staff efficiency as the time previously spent entering and collecting data can now be used to focus on analysis and decision-making.

This advancement in data insight allowed GMP to identify the conditions that lead to absenteeism and its associated costs. This allowed greater management of future absenteeism, which resulted in improved labour costs and a higher retention rate. The simplicity of dashboard reporting for GMP presents an opportunity for data insights, while also providing the ability to drill down to lower levels of detail to see the data behind the results. This automation enabled GMP to quickly alter or fix problems before they encountered any major costs. This solution enabled GMP to access high-level data insight to utilise equipment better, improve operating costs, increasing their cents per kilo in sales, and an overall positive impact on productivity.