Delivering Growth: Automation leads to a 15% increase return on investment

Unleashing the full potential of a world first automated meat processing technology

In partnership with MLA and JBS, SCOTT Technologies developed an innovative world first lamb middle cutting system that failed to catch fire within the industry.  The new automated solution offers a proposed yield improvement of 60 grams per carcase and an increased throughput of 4%, which could not convince sceptical processing plants worried about how the new tech would integrate with their existing setup.  To gain a more in-depth understanding, Greenleaf broke the issue down to its core components, and using complex financial modelling, tested the technology’s ability to the meet the proposed return.  Greenleaf discovered unutilised capabilities that amplified the technology’s true potential, and in turn, its value proposition.  The proposed throughput increased by an impressive 15%, instead of only 4%, and increased the projected return on investment by a compelling 30%.  With the detection of the automation tech’s hidden value, and expertly researched cost-benefit analysis, Greenleaf created an atmosphere around the tech that ensures its success.

Mapping supply chain value across the WA beef industry

Greenleaf analysed the intricacies of the underperforming West Australian (W.A.) beef industry, and identified a surplus of un-tapped profit.   W.A. boxed beef exports account for only 30% of their total sales.  Greenleaf was able to take this information, and zoom out to uncover a long-term strategic plan for increasing W.A. beef’s global footprint.  As a result, advice and analyses derived from this study could broadly improve the W.A beef industry’s standing on the world stage.  Through complex economic modelling, supply chain analysis and an in-depth study of current industry resources and infrastructure, Greenleaf revealed the possibility of a more than threefold increase in profitability for W.A. beef.  These results exemplify Greenleaf’s ability to discover uniquely exploitable market dynamics that ultimately lead to increased industry value.

Teaching your workforce to think creatively

Greenleaf’s Innovation Development Program (IDP) is an exciting hands-on workshop that challenges organisations to change through a bottom-up exploration of innovation thinking and practice.  Greenleaf reclaims innovation from the shadow of genius, and reveals a methodology behind creative thinking that anyone can follow.  Innovation must have two main components: a significant change and something of value that comes from that change.  To shatter the status quo, companies must learn to embrace innovation over simply doing the same thing better.  The IDP will teach participants how to take their ideas from innovative thinking to innovative doing.  As times progress, the IDP will evolve, continuing to offer every participant a customised path toward innovation success.

Bespoke IT Solution

The Australian pork industry, like other industries, wanted to better engage with its producers through new IT solutions. The APL Tech Toolbox ‘App’ developed by Greenleaf can quickly disseminate key APL research outcomes, best management practice information, and upcoming events to all levels of industry.  The App will also be integral for gaining industry feedback on adoption levels and rates of APL R&D information, and help APL to further target its information delivery systems.

Greenleaf built the Tech Toolbox from the ground up to better meet APL’s specific needs, and to ensure that it would keep up with the latest cutting-edge mobile integration. As a result, the App’s user interface delivers a seamless experience across multiple platforms including: iOS, Android, and Windows.  Through their extensive industry knowledge and to-the-minute IT expertise, Greenleaf eschewed the simpler less effective options in favour of a more complex custom-made solution.  This allowed them to work one-on-one with APL to generate a broader long-term strategy, proving that Greenleaf is more than simply a consultant, but rather a key piece in building the company’s future.  As a result of the App’s success, APL has approved a second phase of development, which will allow Greenleaf to add a much wider range of useful features.

Supply side opportunities

Through the Sheep Flagship Project, Greenleaf identified compelling opportunities and capacity for growth in the WA sheep industry, specifically for export markets, as a sustainable global competitor. The production capacity along the entire supply chain was asessed in order to measure industry capacity for growth. This information allowed for the development of strategic supply chain options and the evaluation of the cost, reliability and feasibility of these options.

Greenleaf’s approach involved a progressive, iterative process attempting to align the demand and supply sides of the chain for value optimisation. It considered the capabilities required to realise value opportunities along the chain and to find a sustainable equilibrium through demand and supply side pressures. This also took into consideration the barriers to adoption. Progressive development of capability within sections of the value chain assists with alignment and allows for further support of value chain growth.

Options were developed in conjuction with the Producers of WA through industry assessments done by Gattorna Alignment. Insights were needed into the willingness and capability of producers to increase flock size, and to make long-term commitments to these levels. The information from this supply chain modelling in conjunction with the Gattorna Alignment assessments were used to select the options most suitable to support sustainable growth for each sector within the industry. Greenleaf discovered that the potential gains for the industry are massive – with the financial benefit alone being in excess of $300 million.

Making more with meat!

The MLA Donor Company partnered with ProForm Gourmet Pty Ltd to develop a proprietary, high-moisture cooking process that turns under-utilised, low-value trim into fully cooked products. Each year in Australia, up to 50,000 tonnes of beef is left on the bone during processing and then rendered. This meat could be extracted and put through the proprietary ProForm High Moisture Cooking (PHMC) process to produce cooked meat products for local and export markets. This new optimisation would finally allow beef and lamb processors to compete with poultry, pork, and non-meat products, paving the way toward completely new businesses and business models.  Greenleaf’s innovative approach to technology and R&D lead to the conclusion that the additional value created by PHMC, including more efficient carcase utilisation and lower energy consumption, would ripple throughout the supply chain.  The project is now in its second stage, with Proform Gourmet Pty Ltd commissioning a $10 million commercial demonstration plant in Sydney, NSW. It will produce up to 3,000 tonnes of PHMC product a year that can be used to further explore potential market opportunities.

Building high value supply chains, Australian prawns’ new role in the global market

A group of disparate Australian prawn farmers who lacked product understanding and marketplace power were being routed on the world stage.  Single companies with production exceeding 70,000 MT p.a. dwarfed the 2,000 MT p.a. of the entire Australian prawn aquaculture industry.  Australian farmers lacked quality standards, planned production, and a clear value proposition that would open up alternate markets to make them more competitive against companies whose innovation is driven by their lower raw material and labour costs.  The industry needed to make their measurably higher-quality, but less standardly productive, harvest into a more marketable asset.  Greenleaf found that a number of independent farms sold their harvest into the single domestic wholesale market.  These farmers were receiving a premium over lesser quality imported product, but the price and fragile negotiation process failed to reflect the product’s full value from a global perspective.  Greenleaf aligned the right markets to maximise the consumer value inherent in their product, and developed the Island Fresh Aquaculture value chain.  As a result, the industry saw an increased sales value of an incredible170%.

3D printed meat, can it work?

Greenleaf analysed the viability of three-dimensionally printed (3DP) red meat as a new market opportunity for the Australian red meat industry. 3DP meat, a process by which meat is created (printed) layer-by-layer, raises several questions, including simply, can it work? The fact that it has already been adopted by over 1000 elder-care facilities in Germany proves that to be true. With their detailed knowledge of consumer trends and supply chains, Greenleaf identified three additional key areas of perceived consumer benefit outside of the aforementioned aged-care that show the product’s viability for the consumer/retail set. In addition, they quantified processing benefits over traditional red meat such as: less waste per carcase, additional volume of meat sold, additional value per carcase, and reduced processing cost. Taken together, these findings lead to the conclusion that 3DP beef and lamb offer the Australian red meat industry an opportunity for a combined estimate of $7.8 million per year with the possibility of a 10, 20, or even 100 fold increase in that estimation depending on the specific product offering.

Benchmarking human resource innovation through absorptive capacity

The Australian Meat Processing Corporation (AMPC) commissioned Greenleaf to help understand the industry’s absorptive capacity. Greenleaf defines absorptive capacity as a company’s ability to utilise externally held knowledge through three sequential processes: recognising and understanding potentially valuable new knowledge through exploratory learning, assimilating new knowledge through transformative learning, and using this assimilated knowledge to create new knowledge and commercial outputs through exploitative learning. Using that framework, this exploratory study investigated the current capacity of five companies to absorb, assimilate, and exploit new knowledge for innovation. Greenleaf found that the Australian red meat industry faces market conditions that make it increasingly difficult to compete. Despite the ongoing challenges, there are significant opportunities, if the industry can position itself to keep pace with knowledge innovation and other technological advancements. This opportunity will progressively be realised as the industry builds capacity to absorb and use new knowledge. Modernising and sustaining the industry into the future will require transformational leaders, as well as practical managers to drive change throughout the vertical and horizontal structures of red meat companies, and at a faster pace than has been required in the past.