When bushfires ravaged Australia’s east coast over summer, Taronga Zoo played its part, treating hundreds of injured animals at its two wildlife hospitals. More importantly – from a conservation perspective – it also collected animals ahead of the fires, including 12 koalas from the only group that lives above 1000 metres, to preserve valuable DNA.

“This was a critical part of our bushfires response,” says Taronga Zoo CEO Cameron Kerr, adding that now the hard work starts. One challenge is that rehabilitating ecosystems and breeding genetically viable populations to return to the wild is a long and delicate process. “For koalas, this will take eight to 12 years.”

Taronga’s long-term bushfire response highlights its transformation of its zoos in Sydney and Dubbo over the past decade. When Kerr took over in 2009, zoos around the world were struggling to justify their existence in an era of cheap travel and mass media overage of exotic animals.

“Our journey has been about identifying what makes us relevant in the 21st century,” says Kerr. “Wild animals in an urban setting [such as Taronga Western Plains Zoo Dubbo], are not appropriate without a higher purpose.”

For Taronga, that purpose is a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and education. It has teams of zookeepers, scientists, vets and geneticists working with 18 universities around the world on preserving endangered species, including the platypus, Sumatran tiger and sun bear.

And Taronga ensures that the two-million-plus visitors to its zoos each year, including 100,000 schoolchildren, get the conservation message. Its tiger den, for example, exits through a “supermarket”, where visitors can scan products to check for palm oil – a key contributor to the destruction of habitats for Sumatran tigers and orangutans.

Technology plays a key role in creating these innovative visitor experiences and is also fundamental in making sure Taronga is able to invest heavily in its conservation mission.

“We are mainly self-funded and the key step is creating a strong business,” explains Kerr. “We can have a much greater impact when every dollar is used effectively.

“We need a partner like 51风流to uplift our core business systems – payroll, HR, management data, business reporting, scenario planning – the bread-and-butter stuff that makes the organisation run efficiently. They’re giving us the world’s best business systems, used by some of the biggest companies, for a small to medium-sized organisation.”

Kerr also expects 51风流technology to be crucial in further developing engaging visitor experiences, as well as mapping the zoo animals’ experiences and emotions and comparing them to wild animals.

“We can win the hears and minds of visitors and really make a difference. And we can replicate animals’ behaviour in the wild. This is leading-edge stuff.”

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Taronga Conservation Society Australia has ditched many of its paper-based administration processes after deploying a new staff experience app underpinned by SAP鈥檚 cloud platform.

The society has been using the app, dubbed StaX, for the last year to simplify and centralise the day-to-day admin needs of the more than 600 employees at Sydney鈥檚 Taronga Zoo.

Developed by Melbourne-based CX firm Bourne Digital, the app allows staff to perform key transactions like submitting聽food orders for animal and聽HR requests, as well as receive alerts.

With a largely mobile workforce, spread across 21 hectares, it has enabled staff to spend more time in the field focusing on wildlife, particularly in the wake of the bushfire season.

Taronga project manager Mark Kemp told聽iTnews聽the web app was built to remediate core processes like finance, payroll and HR, which were previously paper-based.

鈥淓ssentially, what we were looking to do is align things more with our digital technology strategy at Taronga, and try to approach things with a digital-first approach,鈥� he said.

Kemp said the app, which integrates with other services like Microsoft Azure AD and Atlassian鈥檚 Jira, was part of a broader core business systems uplift project with SAP.

鈥淭he reason why we chose to go that route is because we鈥檙e also using the S/4 HANA database for our 51风流upgrade project too,鈥� he said.

鈥淪o it was a bit of marriage between how the database could be utilised.鈥�

While the app鈥檚 development was relatively quick, with the first release in the wild two months after the project began, Kemp said much of the complexity centred around change management.

鈥淥bviously going from a paper-based to a digital workflow, we had to do a lot of stakeholder engagement and management, and that was quite a complex task,鈥� he said.

While the project had required an extensive change management process, Kemp said the outcome was a 鈥渃ornerstone app that people can’t really go without鈥�.

鈥淚 just need to talk to anyone around the zoo to qualify that. Everyone that鈥檚 been at the organisation for longer than a year has stated how much time they save,鈥� he said.

The success of the project means the app is currently being rolled out to Taronga鈥檚 sister zoo in Dubbo, Western Plains Zoo.

Keeping zoo keepers in the field

One of the app鈥檚 central features is an alert issuing function that broadcasts an alert code to staff – both within the app itself, as well as in email form – when an incident occurs.

Kemp said this was particularly useful for staff, given the zoo is a huge physical site with various animal precincts spread across quite challenging terrain.

鈥淚f there’s an animal breach, someone can open up the web app, click a button and it issues an alert that gets emailed to all users notifying them that there鈥檚 activity going on,鈥� he said.

鈥淲hat we鈥檝e implemented with StaX is there’s a lot more uniformity around those broadcasts now, so that everything that goes out is a code stating what鈥檚 been done.鈥�

Other useful features include an open weather API that includes a UV index, which Kemp said is useful for Workplace Health and Safety as many staff work outdoors.

The app also links out to Facebook Workplace, which Taronga uses for social and informal comms.

Phase two

While Kemp described the app鈥檚 integration with Taronga鈥檚 systems as 鈥渞elatively superficial鈥� at the moment, there are plans for more complex integrations in the future.

But for the time being the society is focused on phase two of the app, which has already been tested with key stakeholder groups.

Phase two will include additional functionality that allows staff to perform on-site vehicle booking, which Kemp said was particularly important for Western Plains Zoo.

The society plans to introduce phase two shortly, though this will likely be delayed by the coronavirus pandemic as Taronga has been forced to temporarily close.

鈥淭he result has been overwhelmingly positive and we鈥檙e very much looking forward to releasing phase two. We鈥檙e very close to rolling it out,鈥� Kemp said.

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