THE CHALLENGE:

MR APPLECASE STUDY

Mr Apple had a vision of creating a smarter orchard and this meant looking at improvements to the flow of information from the orchard into the packhouse and to other business functions.

There was a realisation that a re-think of their orchard workflow process with the use of emerging technologies could assist in reducing operating costs, improving staff productivity, capturing additional data to improve real-time decision making and potentially highlighting areas to improve orchard yield. In addition, a number of second order benefits could be realised such as improved staff engagement, attraction and improved transparency of information across the business.

Mr Apple is the largest vertically integrated apple company in New Zealand, based in the Hawke’s Bay. They own and control orchards, packhouses, cool stores and logistics operations and are specialists in bringing pure and delicious New Zealand apples to the world.

Mr Apple operates 15 orchard management groups covering 64 Global-Gap accredited orchards across 1,100 hectares of Hawke’s Bay land. They employ over 2,200 people including nearly 400 permanent staff and over 1,800 seasonal workers who are passionate about exceptional quality.

DIGITISING OPERATIONS TO IMPROVE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

MR APPLECASE STUDY

The collaborative Design Thinking approach enabled

Cucumber and Mr Apple to:

• Gain buy-in from all parties across the business on a new process for managing the 250,000+ apple bins and paying orchard workers

• Evaluate products on the market against an agreed prototype and evaluation criteria with confidence

• Trial of the selected product and measure against agreed performance metrics

• Achieve an outcome in a rapid timeframe

Successfully in pilot for this season it is anticipated a new solution will go live in 2019.

The key to learning is to trust the Cucumber Design Thinking process. It helped us to focus on the key problems and work together as a team to create a new process that is creating a better way for everyone.”

“

Grant Stevenson, Orchard ManagerMr Apple

THE OUTCOME:OUR APPROACH:

Cucumber worked collaboratively with the Mr Apple team and together we structured a three-year roadmap towards a smarter orchard goal, which consists of a number of projects to solve specific challenges.

Cucumber then introduced a tailored Design Thinking approach and facilitated workshops with the Mr Apple team to meet the design challenges for digitising the current orchard bin harvest and worker pay management processes. The Design Thinking approach ensured our joint teams better understood the challenges and opportunities to be addressed and then based on this insight, build out the right business processes and assist in the selection of the right technology solution.This staged approach with participation from key staff across the business resulted in a new process map and development of a lo-fi physical prototype to illustrate the proposed new way of working. This was validated with stakeholders across the supply chain and used to assess a range of suitable potential products on the market.