Page 21 - Food & Drink Business August 2018

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MEAT, FISH & POULTRY
preserve and reuse any of the existing structure.”
Swickers relied on Watpac’s engineering expertise to demonstrate this to insurers, so they could start designing a replacement as soon as possible.
“It was a really fluid environment,” says van Barneveld. “We were housing people off site to continue boning operations two hours from Kingaroy, and after four months it was clear they were struggling.
“So we made a decision to build a temporary facility [at Kingaroy] to bring them back, and this required significant changes in the project.”
Watpac’s Specialty Services sector head Greg Sneyd says Watpac began planning the rebuild the day after the fire.
“We commenced construction prior to Christmas 2016, with the new processing lines commissioned in early November [2017], and the
boning room commissioned by the end of that month, so it was effectively 12 months from the day of the fire to full use.
“There was a like-for-like insurance policy and this offered an opportunity to modernise the facility,” Sneyd says.
By overlapping the design and construction phases, Watpac was able to fast track the $90m project, reducing lead times on ordered equipment by
Kingaroy is a small town and we tried to use local contractors where we could, but the small population was limiting.”
He says the unique challenges of the project required all participants to work as one.
“Our contractors and workers had to carefully plan their activities so they didn’t do anything to put the existing production at the facility into jeopardy,” says Sneyd.
✷ QUICK WORK THE BRIEF
Swickers Bacon Factory in Kingaroy is Australia’s largest pork producer, and one of the town’s major employers.
The facility’s 6,000m2 export chilling, boning room, packing and dispatching building was destroyed by fire in 2016, and within three days Swickers had established a temporary offsite facility in Ipswich to do the boning.
Watpac was quickly contracted to work together with Swickers and the insurers to get the Kingaroy operation back up and running in the shortest time frame possible.
Due to extremely high business interruption costs it was imperative that Watpac began designing a permanent replacement build and process layout within days after the fire.
The main priority was the replacement boning room, but in the temporary Ipswich boning facility over 120 staff were still living away from home, so a larger-scale temporary boning room at Kingaroy was also designed with construction starting early in 2017.
In the months that followed, Watpac rolled out the multi-phased project within the tight timeframe, with the permanent processing facility up and running within
a year of the disaster.
“ When you have an event like a fire, you learn very quickly that you have to take control of your own destiny.”
flying in some items on specially chartered jets.
“We wouldn’t dream of doing that in a normal contracting situation, but when you are hit by a fire, normal processes aren’t necessarily the best way forward,” Sneyd says.
“A key challenge was that
“Watpac had to think on their feet, and bring in manpower from far and wide,” says van Barneveld. “We have been very lucky to be able to restore the factory within 12 months. They did a good job under trying conditions and we have a high qualitybuild.” ✷
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