Silver Fern Farms boosts employee engagement with Oracle Cloud

Employee engagement, enhancement, and empowerment are central to Silver Fern Farms’ people strategy. Across its supplier representatives, production sites, and corporate hubs in New Zealand and internationally, New Zealand’s leading food manufacturer employs 7,000 people.

The company’s people strategy, coupled with its values of “Unstoppable Together, Always Caring and Improving Tomorrow” called for a platform that could do more than simply link staff members across locations. Essentially, Silver Fern Farms sought a platform that enabled it to engage with its employees, understand their experiences and goals, and subsequently provide further upskilling and development opportunities.

Silver Fern Farms was operating a suite of disparate homegrown tools that did not integrate with other systems. Payroll, recruitment, talent development, and management required high levels of manual intervention, which increased the risk of errors through duplication. Manual intervention was also required for scheduling, organizing, and tracking employee information, because each location maintained its own database of employee information and training.

As a result, HR staff and managers spent too much time verifying data and managing it rather than engaging with employees and helping to enhance their performance. The team needed an organizational platform that would help seamlessly transition candidates to employees, as well as help the company to evaluate the skills of the workforce and predict attrition.

In order to deliver more employee development initiatives, Silver Fern Farms decided to establish a central repository as a single source of truth.

“Modernized HR processes that enhance employee experience and business agility were among the key factors that influenced us to choose Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM,” says Matt Ballard, chief people officer at Silver Fern Farms. Additional factors in the company’s selection process were the software’s ease of use, product development pathway and the commitment of Oracle Partner Pinpoint HRM.

As a scalable platform, Oracle Cloud HCM aligns with Silver Fern Farms’ HR and business strategies, which focus on enabling employees to concentrate on business transformation rather than on administering technology. Along with alignment and development of people resources, Oracle Cloud HCM provides real-time data to support business and leadership decisions. The solution also enables the company to implement best practices in a standardized and efficient manner.

“We wanted a tier-1 product, a single source of truth, access to thought leadership, and excellence in people practices and tools that would enables us to ‘Improve Tomorrow.’ Oracle was undoubtedly in the lead,” says Ballard. “In a significant improvement over the previous homebuilt system, 74% of Silver Fern Farms’ employees have defined their goals for the year via Oracle Performance Management.”

Silver Fern Farms launched its transition to Oracle Cloud HCM with the implementation of Oracle Cloud HCM Core. The company designed a new organization structure for its 7,000 employees in just six weeks. This structure laid a solid foundation for aligning and building people resources to assist in advancing the company’s objectives.

Using Oracle, Silver Fern Farms employees gained benefits in the learning environment while the company improved back-office operations. The integration of LinkedIn Learning and Oracle Learning gave employees access to a range of content. With this initiative, the organization tracked employee development and provided opportunities to enhance skills, which in turn boosted employee engagement. About 160 team members enrolled in 365 LinkedIn courses via Oracle Learning, with 150 of them completed and the remainder in progress within the first 6 months of launch.

Streamlining employee recruitment through Oracle Recruiting was the focus of a second deployment phase. Seasonality of the workforce, which is factored into its natural turnover rate, no longer presents an issue with onboarding. The company used Oracle Recruiting for onboarding, designed to boost employee productivity and engagement. In the first five and a half months, the company received 1,721 applications and completed 35 hires in its permanent workforce.

Using Oracle Workforce Compensation, the company streamlined its annual review of workforce remuneration with a reduction of 10 days’ effort while also allowing multiple compensation processes to be handled simultaneously. The self-service the company sought for its managers and employees allowed them to access compensation information easily. In the first compensation review round, over 50 leaders engaged with the system to complete annual remuneration reviews for more than 1,100 staff, including 20 employees in six international locations.

Initially, half the permanent staff outlined their impact and development goals, and by the end of 2021, more than 40% of the staff had completed a performance review as part of the initial soft launch of the system and new processes.

It is also important to note that Oracle Performance Management facilitates transparency of information and effective internal communication within an organization, which is vital for developing trust and has a significant impact on employee engagement and productivity.

Silver Fern Farms worked with Oracle Partner Pinpoint HRM to deploy Oracle Cloud HCM. With Pinpoint’s guidance, Silver Fern Farms was able to smoothly transition into phase one of its transformation.