AUSTRALIA'S largest banana grower has turned to a cloud based platform to help manage its growing workforce and optimise supply chain and financial management.
Mackays, which is Australia's largest single producer of bananas, is a fourth generation family operated business, boasting 75 years of farming experience.
Privately owned and diversely integrated, the business now produces a beef, sugar and a variety tropical fruits, with properties situated across three main regions - Lakeland, Tully, and Bundaberg.
To facilitate the increasing demand of their growing business, Mackays have turned to Oracle - a cloud platform with a suite of integrated applications that will assist with the management of their growing workforce, optimising efficiencies in supply chain and financial management.
Mackays chief executive officer Alex Hutton said the change to the cloud platform was a necessary because the business had recently acquired additional farming properties and were expanding with new crops.
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"We currently distribute more than $2.6 million cases of bananas around Australia every year, and we are preparing for higher volumes and diversified cropping over the next two to five years as we increase production of avocados, papayas and other crops," Mr Hutton said.
"We needed a solution that would be simple to use and maintain but would be capable of handling the volume of transactions we are expecting.
"We had previously outsourced labor hire to an agency and managed applications using a variety of applications, but as our workforce grew that was becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to manage across multiple sites.
"We needed a solution that would allow us to insource these processes to better manage our growth and add self-service capabilities for our employees".
The first stage of implementation will be managed by KPMG Enterprise.
"Mackays is a great Australian business with great fundamentals but like many in the agricultural sector, the business doesn't employ a huge IT team, so it was crucial we helped them find a simple solution that they could use effectively," KPMG Enterprise partner Linda Chai said.
"Oracle's true SaaS applications means the team at Mackay's will benefit from quarterly updates and won't have to worry about upgrading and maintaining their systems."
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