Sphera > Case Studies > Cutting the Cheese: Sustainability Monitoring and Reporting Made Easy

Cutting the Cheese: Sustainability Monitoring and Reporting Made Easy

Company Size

1,000+

Region

Pacific

Country

Australia

Product

SoFi software

Tech Stack

Data Collection
Data Integration
Reporting

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Environmental Impact Reduction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Industries

Food & Beverage

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization
Regulatory Compliance Monitoring

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Founded in 1899, Bega Cheese grew from a simple Australian dairy cooperative—based in Bega, NSW Australia—to go public in 2011 on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). Bega Cheese (BGA) now has revenue of $1.4 billion and 2,000+ employees, exporting products to over 50 countries. The company had challenges monitoring and reporting environmental performance and sustainability achievements across its supply chain. It needed to collect sustainability data from all business units and integrate it into other internal systems for reporting. At varying levels in the organization and at varying intervals, it collected energy consumption, water consumption, wastewater and solid waste data.

The Challenge

Bega Cheese®, an Australian dairy food manufacturer, had challenges monitoring and reporting environmental performance and sustainability achievements across its supply chain. It needed to collect sustainability data from all business units and integrate it into other internal systems for reporting. At varying levels in the organization and at varying intervals, it collected energy consumption, water consumption, wastewater and solid waste data. Bega Cheese was unable to easily track its sustainability performance or generate ad hoc reports in a timely manner with confidence in the quality of the data it collected. Bega Cheese’s initial software solution could only create a pre-determined, fixed set of reports and provided no way to create ad hoc reports requested by its stakeholders. For every exception, Bega Cheese had to return to the software provider to ask for customized reports, leading to additional cost and time expenditures.

The Solution

Dairy Australia brought Sphera’s SoFi software to Bega Cheese’s attention. SoFi software was more intuitive, and users could configure reports easily. If operators with the appropriate access wanted to change the reporting format or parameters, they could do it quickly and without outside assistance. SoFi enabled Bega Cheese to respond easily to questions from regulators and customers. Rather than having to search for or recreate the dataset for each request, Bega Cheese can now regenerate correctly formatted customer reports anytime it wants. SoFi’s intuitive configuration and inherent flexibility saves time and assists Bega Cheese in fluently tracking its sustainability performance. In addition, SoFi helped Bega Cheese collect data from external and internal systems, resulting in better quality data so operations could make faster, more efficient decisions with timeline and trend reporting. Sphera’s experience migrating organizations from other systems ensured a simple, effective and painless transition to SoFi.

Operational Impact

Bega Cheese can now configure reports on its own without additional costs or extensive waiting periods.
Bega Cheese has structured its subscription such that 3 days of service are factored into the plan every year, ensuring flexibility so if they ever have an issue they cannot handle on their own, they have service built into their subscription.
At a comparable annual subscription cost to their previous vendor, Bega Cheese experiences greater flexibility and independent capability, reducing vendor support costs.

Quantitative Benefit

Bega Cheese can now create its own management and board reports with the flexibility to manage SoFi independently.
Bega Cheese can save costs and time when adding new data points, meters, departments and sites into the software.
Bega Cheese has improved its capacity to easily fulfil external requirements, such as customer questionnaires, industry reporting and regulatory reporting (required by the Environmental Protection Agency).