Every company needs its dream application, iPath Workflow is definitely ours
The Tatua Co-operative Dairy company spans a 96-year history of
producing high-quality, specialised dairy products for export
around the world. With its Tatuanui manufacturing site based within
a twelve-kilometre radius of all its farmer suppliers, the company
sources the freshest raw material and enjoys a wonderful community
culture among stakeholders.
Choosing to steer clear of merger during industry de-regulation
in 2001, Tatua has proven that choosing to retain their corporate
identity was the right decision; often topping the per-kilo pay-out
of the industry's other major players.
The fact that the business grew up around it's original vision
meant, as in most cases, that there were no controls in place
around commercialising new opportunities and managing changes to
existing products
Often the team that needed to make important decisions would
head out, armed with Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, to try
and correlate data (such as food and labelling regulations) from
many and varied markets, train new staff (only a handful of staff
knew enough to do this), and keep creation-to-shelf lead times at a
competitive level.
"There simply came a point where we had to acknowledge that the
workload created by our manual and disparate systems was too much",
Colin Foster, Tatua's General Manager Finance &
Administration.
Once the problem was acknowledged; the search for a solution
began. Geoff Lawn, Tatua's Systems Engineer, outlined three
distinct requirements; "the solution obviously had to be flexible
and powerful enough to process our large and varied data sets. We
wanted to operate the solution through SharePoint so it was
accessible and user-friendly, and finally, in-house maintenance of
the resulting workflows was important to us."
The Solution:
Unable to find an off-the-shelf product with the flexibility
required, Tatua turned to Olympic Software for their product iPath
Workflow. "We searched for a solution and quickly realised that
nothing off-the-shelf would meet our requirements. During this
phase we also developed a better understanding of the complex,
technical requirements our technical support staff had to deal with
- iPath stood out as the best way to deal with that complexity"
said Colin.
Stage one of the product commercialisation project was completed
concurrently with i-path and web development training. After that
it was plain-sailing for Geoff and his technical support team.
"Integrating with other SQL-based systems is ridiculously easy,
maintenance and upkeep of workflows likewise, and automated alerts,
internally and externally, are so completely organised - the users
love it." Once stage one was completed Geoff and his team started
to play with and implement additional workflows - the results speak
for themselves
The Results:
Results were dramatic, exciting and quick. "The ingredient
validation process was cut to about one-tenth of its original time
within a few weeks - this got staff really excited about iPath and
it was at this point that we realised the potential for the tool
not just within our department, but across the whole company," said
Geoff. "Since then, we have built more workflows across the
company, with another ten planned for the next year. Every company
needs its dream application - this is definitely ours."
