Our Customer
A New Zealand owned producer of frozen and packaged fruit, soups, baby food, canned goods, cooking and table sauces, dressings, pet foods and ready to serve meals.
Project Description
Our customer’s average number of field employees across 2019 was 400, with a sharp seasonal summer up-swing to support the business, with productions staff to can fruits, beetroots, corn and tomatoes. This peaks in March when peaches are ready for canning. At this time, our customer had a workforce across their sites of 700 employees in 2020, and over 1,000 the year prior. The out of season winter workforce averages at 250 employees.
There have been many challenges facing our customer which have included:
- Crop volatility: such as rain, hail, canker, rot, machine break downs
- Safety: a huge volume of workers on a large site for short periods of time
- A complex business: billing, cost allocations, compliance details
- COVID-19: the pandemic’s New Zealand lockdowns and border closures with 42% of our customer’s workforce in 2020 being travelers.
Project Solution
Due to the large number of workers on large sites, our safety management team established close partnerships with our customers to ensure the safety of our employees coming into the next season.
We utilized our dashboard technology for time capture and rostering in our second season, ensured a smooth run, upgraded to the use of hand-wave clocks, instead of finger scanners to ensured we met COVID-19 hygiene protocols. This mitigated our customers billing, cost allocation and compliance requirement concerns.
Due to significantly fewer travelling workers, we approached our sourcing strategy differently. This included targeting those who have supported us in past seasons and those who were left without work during the pandemic, for example, stranded travelers in Aotearoa, or those workers in the tourism and hospitality sectors affected by the closed borders.
