With more complex commercial ecosystems, the ways businesses supply produce need to be digitally enabled. George Stancu and Vidhya Thangarajan from PwC’s Tech Consulting practice share their insights. The story first appeared in Food & Drink Business April 2020.
A wholesale fresh produce market may not be the first place you’d expect to find a digital experience. The seemingly endless rows of fresh seasonal fruits, green vegetables and cut flowers feel a world away from the digital transformation that so many businesses are grappling with. And yet increasingly, the food we eat is being drawn into digital ecosystems – from how it is grown to how it is transported, traded and, crucially, trusted.
Although markets have long and varied histories, the way that many of them do business has not adapted with time. Selling fruit and vegetables is not a complicated process, but the logistics of doing so in a modern era, and at a scale that will allow for a growing and sprawling population, is becoming so.
A city in a city
For the Melbourne Market, this meant it was time to digitise its operations. With a warehouse footprint of 120,000 square metres, a veritable city within a city, it is one of the largest warehouse precincts of any central market in Australia and the world. Within its bounds traders, contractors, forklifts, buggies, a recycling plant, and a diesel station co-exist.
The market has its own rules and regulations, safety requirements, speed limits, and demerit point system that contractors, traders, wholesalers and retailers must adhere to.
Until recently, a good percentage of the maintenance and operation of this world was documented on paper and in spreadsheets. Signing up for a market stall required a 20-page form filled out with supplementary documents attached.
From the traders’ point of view, it was underwhelming. Frustration around the ease of access to market services – such as access cards, parking permits or paying invoices was cumbersome, manual and slow. The existing technological infrastructure was not adequate to build digital services on.
Fixing the system
To fix this, the market implemented new technology. With a Customer Relationship Management system from Salesforce and other cloud-enabled services, the market has transformed its operations to meet digital best practices.
For traders, this means a better customer experience, and the ability to access market services from a one-stop, self-serve online portal. Here they will be to access real time details of their business such as invoices, employee information, infringements and parking availability or submit requests for new business registration, lease and licence changes. The market’s core systems will be connected, integrated, and mobile-enabled.
For the Authority itself, it now has insight into the sub-contractors being used for maintenance and the dollars being spent. It will improve the end-to-end visibility of any incidents that occur – such as a trader speeding and hitting a boom gate, the extent of the damage, the contractor used to fix it and the amount of money spent getting it operational again. Future plans will see the further digitisation of stalls, stands, warehouses, property allocation and more.
The dream is for a vibrant and sustainable market that, enabled by digital, will become a market precinct that offers a wide range of fresh produce, processing, distribution and a significant logistics centre. With transactional data collected from digital trading (currently most stand holders operate manual systems) the market will be able to flex when it comes to seasonal produce, improve operational efficiencies, understand what products are moving or standing still and allocate stands more efficiently.
As customer expectations increase regarding quality and value, supply chains grown unwieldy, regulation grows and resources become scarce, where we source our food matters more and more.
Food for Thought
While fruit, vegetables and meat remain firmly in the physical domain, increasingly, there is intersection with technology and we feel this is just the beginning. As consumers demand higher quality food, practices around obtaining produce are under more scrutiny. Being able to ensure the quality of food, and trading that keeps it moving quickly and efficiently once picked, will be necessary to keep people safe — and satisfied.
