As Aotearoa New Zealand’s recognised third-party verifier for food safety, biosecurity, and export certification, AsureQuality brings over 150 years of sector experience to every shipment it certifies. Every operational improvement AsureQuality makes flows through to the integrity of systems that New Zealanders and international markets rely on.
What makes AsureQuality’s transformation remarkable is the pace and ambition of their journey. Four years ago, the organisation’s digital capability was nascent. A single person across 1,800 people focused on data engineering, operational systems were siloed, and there was no integration architecture to speak of. Today, the organisation runs three thriving digital communities of practice spanning AI, business intelligence, and integration/orchestration, has deployed AI-assisted automation across core business processes, and is pioneering what may be a world-first application of computer vision and machine learning in meat inspection.
Behind that transformation is Elke VanderMeijden, Group Manager of the Transformation Delivery Office, who joined from Mercury Energy where she had initiated an award-winning digital twin programme, and Pamela Whitfield, Head of Digital Transformation. This is the story of how they built something that did not previously exist.
A Blank Canvas and Bold Mandate
Building the business case for the transformation alone took eighteen months. The executive and board were being asked to commit significant investment in digital capability at a time when the economic climate was difficult, and when the organisation’s own track record of digital delivery was thin.
The external pressure was also mounting. Customers worldwide are demanding more from New Zealand food producers. It is no longer sufficient for food to be safe. There is growing expectation of transparency around production methods and verification of values-based claims such as organic, sustainable, or grass-fed provenance. Manual, siloed processes cannot scale to meet that complexity. Competitors had entered the market with digital offerings, raising the bar for customer experience across the sector.
Internally, the operating picture was just as fragmented. Customers with complex assurance portfolios were navigating multiple siloed systems and multiple entry points into the business. Back-office processes that experienced auditors and inspectors needed to complete, before and after fieldwork, were manual and slow. AsureQuality’s people expertise remained its differentiator, but the team could see customer experience expectations being shaped by everyday digital interactions, not by what has historically been normal in food assurance.
Elke recognised that what the business needed was a foundational data capability to see itself as one organisation serving one customer, an integration and orchestration platform that could connect its systems without requiring deep software engineering capability, and the cultural willingness to change how people thought about work, not just the tools they used.
Building the Flywheel
Elke and her team made a deliberate architectural choice. Rather than building a deep custom software engineering capability from scratch – which would take years to mature and would not scale to the breadth of systems they needed to connect – they selected Workato as their integration and orchestration platform. It allowed a small transformation team to connect systems, automate workflows, and deliver proof points without each integration becoming a months-long development project.
The first major production use case was accounts payable. Invoices arriving by email were being manually read, validated, coded, and processed through the finance system. The finance manager who sponsored the initiative set a demanding target: redesign the process so thoroughly that when a team member departed, no replacement would be needed. Using Workato’s intelligent document processing alongside orchestration logic that handles approval routing, validation rules, and downstream payment execution, that target was met.
The second major use case was in auditing. AsureQuality’s auditors produce complex reports, often exceeding fifty pages, that draw on customer history, prior audit findings, and new inputs gathered in the field. Writing these from scratch required days of expert work, and a second senior auditor had to review each one for consistency and quality before it could be sent. Workato now orchestrates an AI-powered workflow that assembles the core report components automatically, incorporates the relevant customer history, and conducts an AI-assisted peer review pass. Auditors review and refine the output rather than building it.
The outcomes confirmed the direction. But what Elke describes as more significant than any individual result is the effect on the organisation’s appetite for further change.
“One person shows what’s possible, and it creates a flywheel around others imagining what’s possible for them.”
Elke VanderMeijden, Group Manager, Transformation Delivery Office, AsureQuality
Pamela Whitfield, Head of Digital Transformation at AsureQuality, points to the three communities of practice as the structural mechanism behind this momentum. Each community – spanning AI, business intelligence, and integration/orchestration – has embedded domain experts in every business unit who train peers, solve problems collaboratively, and manage their own backlog of digital opportunities using product management discipline.
From Back-Office Automation to Frontier Technology
AsureQuality’s pioneering approach yielded concrete results.
- Zero replacement hire: The accounts payable automation absorbed a team member’s departure without a replacement hire.
- 30% reduction in audit report turnaround time: Audit reports that previously required days of manual authoring now take significantly less time, with early results indicating a three-hour saving per report. The programme is swiftly being extended to additional audit types.
- Three digital communities of practice established across AI, business intelligence, and integration/orchestration, with embedded experts across every business unit.
- Unified customer view: Customer data, previously siloed across laboratory, auditing, and certification systems, is now unified. A customer with a full assurance portfolio is now served by one AsureQuality, not three. The Zendesk customer support capability built on top of it has improved the day-to-day experience for customers and frontline staff alike.
- Natural demand emerging organically from business units, without central prompting, for new automation and AI-assisted use cases
What Comes Next
AsureQuality is now in a position the organisation could not have imagined four years ago. Its data foundations have matured to the point where genuinely ambitious frontier projects are viable. The most significant is a proof of concept applying computer vision and machine learning to meat inspection – one of New Zealand’s most critical export assurance functions. Currently a manual, labour-intensive process conducted in meat processing plants, AI-powered inspection could change the cost, speed, and accuracy of assurance at scale. It may represent a world-first application in the sector.
The trajectory points to an organisation that has moved from renovating administrative processes to rethinking its value proposition. In a regulated industry where the instinct is often to proceed cautiously, AsureQuality’s approach offers a model that other companies can learn from: invest in data and integration foundations first, go where the energy is, build communities of practice that distribute digital literacy, and lean into AI when the evidence supports it.
For organisations curious about what enterprise orchestration looks like in regulated industries, AsureQuality’s transformation is worth following closely.
At the 2026 New Zealand CIO Innovation Awards, AsureQuality won the Best ICT team Culture and Inclusion Award.