How ANZCO Foods Achieved Unmatched Project Visibility with Real-Time Insights, Risk Management, and Resource Optimization

ANZCO Foods is one of New Zealand’s largest exporters with annual sales of NZ$1.65 billion and more than 3,000 employees worldwide. A dynamic multinational company, ANZCO Foods has four core business activities: procure the best beef and lamb grown year round on New Zealand’s lush, green pastures, process prime New Zealand beef and lamb in state-of-the-art, accredited facilities, design and create sophisticated food and healthcare solutions, and market & guarantee year-round delivery of premium beef and lamb products to more than 80 countries around the world. ANZCO’s core business activities are seamlessly integrated, ensuring high quality beef and lamb products are delivered to exact standards, on time and in full from farmers’ pastures to the plate of the consumer.

ANZCO Foods has been in business since 1984. Originally the business marketed New Zealand beef and lamb to Japan, but over time and through acquisition expanded the business to incorporate several meat processing plants, manufacturing facilities and farms.

Given the nature of the expansion, until 2014 ANZCO sites ran independently with their own HR, Finance, Payroll, ICT and Operations teams. Recognizing the need to modernize business practices in an increasingly competitive and globalized market, ANZCO embarked on a strategy of consolidation and began to centralize business functions into a corporate office.

As part of this approach, ANZCO began a large program of investment across the organization, including upgrading core IT systems, plant automation, health & safety transformation and asset upgrades. With its ongoing maturity in the management of its investments, ANZCO undertook a review of its project portfolio management practices.

New Zealand’s wider meat industry is characterized by having expensive asset bases and low profit margins. This means every ounce of investment needs to be rigorously reviewed to ensure it adds value. Based on these circumstances, ANZCO recognized it needed to adjust how it managed projects and its wider portfolio to ensure it made wise investments and delivered forecasted benefits.

“We had no consistent practices, no tool for managing projects outside of spreadsheets and reporting was manual and time-consuming. All this meant that our project managers were spending time on work that would have been better spent on their projects.” – Jon Bruwer, Head of Programmes, ANZCO Foods.

The business determined efficiencies could be gained by introducing a more formal framework, carefully monitoring the performance of projects to ensure their success. There was significant buy-in for a consistent approach to project management, common tools and, most importantly, the availability of data and reporting to allow management to make good decisions.

ANZCO’s response to this review was to create a centralized portfolio management function – the Programmes’ Office. The function was given oversight and delivery of the project portfolio and mandated to find a tool to assist with managing projects successfully. Initially the business trialed Trello and Mavenlink as tools, but found they lacked all the functionality that was desired.

Following a rigorous evaluation of other tools on the market, ANZCO selected AdaptiveWork as its tool for project portfolio management. AdaptiveWork was selected because of the depth of functions the systems provide, coupled with its high configurability to support a wide variety of project types and work styles. By gathering all projects into one platform, ANZCO now has greater visibility into risks, costs and resource loads.

“AdaptiveWork allows us to intuitively keep project progress up-to-date and manage risks more effectively, because they are more visible. It also means that we can create project documentation at the touch of a button, saving us time and providing us with real-time access to business critical data points like resource load, portfolio cost and risk,” – Jon Bruwer, Head of Programmes, ANZCO Foods.

In addition, ANZCO PMs can use AdaptiveWork to work any way they want, as the system supports Waterfall and Agile approaches. By providing a system that supports both, the Programmes’ Office has increased the efficacy of individual project managers. The ANZCO team has also used the tool to automate repetitive and time-consuming steps in the reporting process, saving the PMs time so they can focus on what matters most, their projects.

Beyond the strong system functionality, ANZCO also appreciates the close partnership it has established with Planview. The post-sales support provided by AdaptiveWork has allowed ANZCO to make continuous adjustments to their system use without disruption. Product enhancement requests are considered and promptly implemented where appropriate; system configuration questions are addressed in a timely manner and with a level of expertise which provides confidence in the outcome.

“The support from Planview has been outstanding. Working in partnership with Planview and using their experience, we’ve created a tool that meets all our business needs” – Jon Bruwer, Head of Programmes, ANZCO Foods.

ANZCO continues to optimize the system and increase the uptake across the business. By expanding the number of projects and users, the value ANZCO gains from the platform’s data continues to grow.