MELBOURNEIT.COM.AU/ENTERPRISE

SAFE FOOD QLDACHIEVE GREATER VISIBILITY OF FOOD SAFETY PERFORMANCE

/ CASE STUDY /

CLOUD PRACTICE FROM MELBOURNE IT ENTERPRISE SERVICES: BSM GLOBAL. 2

CASE STUDYSAFE FOOD QUEENSLANDSAFE FOOD QLD ACHIEVE GREATER VISIBILITY OF FOOD SAFETY

PERFORMANCE WITH MELBOURNE IT ENTERPRISE SERVICES.

ABOUT SAFE FOODSafe Food Queensland is the regulatory body that oversees

all food production processes in Queensland. Safe Food

Queensland’s mandate is to ensure that all businesses

understand their responsibilities regarding food safety, and in

doing so, allow consumers to have confidence in the safety and

quality of food produced in Queensland.

Safe Food Queensland reports to the Minister of Agriculture

and Fisheries, and is responsible for ensuring that

Queensland’s food production system meets national food

safety standards.

THE CHALLENGESafe Food has typically relied on paper systems for reporting

of environmental data from chicken processing plants. Paper

reports would be filled out by plant operators throughout the

day, with final data being compiled into a spreadsheet and

emailed to Safe Food at the end of the week. Unfortunately,

by the time this data was received by Safe Food, chicken

processed earlier in the week would already have been sold to

consumers and eaten, thereby limiting the ability of Safe Food

to mitigate any risks of food poisoning from incorrectly handled

chicken.

Safe Food engaged the Outware Mobile Practice from

Melbourne IT to digitise this system in order to improve the

efficiency of reporting and allow them to better regulate the

processing of chicken in Queensland.

THE SOLUTIONOutware ran a preliminary Pre-Development Sprint with

Safe Food to test the hypothesis that data capture could be

performed using a tablet app and exported via a web app

dashboard. Outware produced a prototype app and visited a

large poultry processing plant to test the prototype with plant

operators. After receiving positive feedback from both Safe

Food and the plant operators, Outware proceeded to kick off

the full development project.

The nature of poultry processing presented several challenges

for the development of this project, including limited wifi

access in plants, and the fact that Quality Control staff (QCs) do

not have individual work email addresses to use as login IDs.

Further, QCs must wear thick gloves whilst at work to protect

their hands from cold temperatures, meaning that the user

interface of the app needed to account for a lack of precision

in gesture and interaction. There is also typically a high

turnover of QC staff in processing plants, meaning that the app

would need to be easy to use so that new QCs could be quickly

onboarded. To better understand the unique requirements of

the project, members of the Outware team visited production

facilities to view the daily operations of QCs. This allowed

Outware to gain a clearer picture of how the product would be

used in-situ and what kind of adaptations needed to be made

to suit the user’s’ environment.

“From the beginning I knew we would be working with an extremely talented team but what we didn’t pay for was the ownership and emotional investment each staff member took for our product, this you cannot put a price on. The entire team went above and beyond what most company employees typically do. We love our product, our app. It delivers on all our wishes and I cannot wait to get it into more facilities.” - Dianna Angeli, Safe Food Queensland

THE RIGHT SOLUTION IS MELBOURNE ITmelbourneit.com.au/enterprise

1800 664 222 corporate.sales@melbourneit.com.au

Outware developed an easy to use iPad app that allows QCs to

enter data about temperature, pH levels, moisture, and other

environmental factors within their processing plant. The data

captured in this app is retrieved and stored via web APIs and

displayed in a web app for use by Safe Food. The web app also

allows Safe Food to view the data daily via dashboards, and

analyse results against performance targets, allowing them to

proactively identify potential food safety issues.

The iPad app also creates greater efficiency in reporting,

reducing the instance of human error, providing instantaneous

feedback, and eliminating the duplication of process that was

inherent to the paper-based system. The iPad app was built

using Swift, and makes use of a highly customised keyboard to

address the unique user interface requirements of the project.

The result is an easy to use iPad app that allows QCs to record

data easily, and a web app that provides Safe Food with a

highly visual way of accessing data from processing plants.

THE OUTCOME

This app provides Safe Food with greater visibility of food safety

performance in Queensland.

Safe Food has been extremely satisfied with the outcome of

the project, saying that it was ‘a pleasure working with the

entire Outware team; their effort, professionalism, and talent

resulted in a product which exceeded our expectations’.

Outware is now working with Safe Food to produce similar

projects for meat and egg processing over the coming months.