Board chairman Jeff Grant announced the name – OSPRI – three months later, and the merger took effect formally on July 1. Late last year McCook was working in an office in Wellington while the floor above was being renovated to allow NAIT staff to move in.
“As soon as possible we want to get the NAIT team and the AHB team together in the new image, OSPRI,” he said.
He has an engineering background, looking at processes and has honed his leadership and management skills in several jobs over the last 10-15 years.
“I have had gumboots-on experience in the factories, I have worked with farmers and suppliers at Alpine, and then with some of the country’s top agricultural products and I’ve had a heavy programme with dairy farmers through the Tb programme.”
He was born in Christchurch and in his last year at school he was drawn to chemical process engineering. He applied for a place on the course at Canterbury University.
He graduated with first class honours, opening the door to his acceptance into the dairy industry graduate training programme, co-ordinated by the Dairy Research Institute (now the Fonterra Research and Development Centre).
He spent the year doing a post-graduate diploma in dairy science and technology, but there was also practical experience. He spent a month at a butter factory, a month in a powder factory, a month in a casein factory, a month in a cheese factory …
At that time significant acceptance testing of new plant and equipment was being undertaken for the dairy companies that were installing them. Somebody independent had to validate that the plant was running to specifications.
At the end of the year he had his post-graduate diploma with distinction, then spent 12 months with the research institute’s milk powder and drying section before heading for the Leatherhead Food Research Institute in London in 1986.
During his short stint there he again was engaged in process engineering, this time involving novelty food manufacturing techniques then he ran a pilot plant treating effluent.
On his return to Christchurch he started work with Alpine Dairy Products managing a production facility in Christchurch, then closing it and relocating equipment at the Clandeboye site (now part of Fonterra) which the company then owned. He started and managed the new cream products unit at Clandeboye, again a specialty food ingredients plant.
“We did make standard things, but we also made a lot of completely new, innovative dairy products,” he said.
“I remember one meeting in the farm hall with the suppliers saying ‘it seems your cream products can make absolutely everything except money’.”
McCook was involved in building export markets, working with the Dairy Board in Japan and Korea with different types of ingredients and blends. He became operations manager for manufacturing at Clandeboye, through a period of huge expansion, until he left in 1995 to become group operations manager for Donaghy’s Industries.
Initially he was responsible for its manufacturing plants in Australia and NZ but he rose to become general manager of the company’s environmental textiles division and setting up export markets in South America.
After five years at Donaghy’s he worked for two years with the Land Transport Safety Authority (as it was then called) as general manager operations, responsible for road engineering, driver licensing, vehicle registration and compliance. Then he joined the AHB as chief executive.
He was phoned while overseas and asked if he was interested in the job, looked into it and decided he was.
“And I suppose the skills and abilities which I had – large operational complex programmes – needed that end-to-end focus,” he said.
“It fitted really well with what I do.”
McCook has spent the last 10 years building the organisation.
“We find particularly with the Tb scheme you have to have the knowledge and understanding of farmers and their support for it to be successful, so that when people are reporting movements or tagging animals, they can relate to why and they can understand the risks that they face.
“The best way to do that is by farmers communicating to farmers so we have a very strong regional Tbfree committee at work that helps with that.”
At a stakeholder level, OSPRI works closely with DairyNZ and Federated Farmers and it’s important that their and shareholders’ expectations are met.
“We’ve got a real feeling of excitement about OSPRI, and where that’s heading, so my role in leading that process is to make sure we have the right people, we know where we’re heading, and that we have all the systems.”
Personal success for him will be his involvement in new schemes to help the country’s primary industries.
“And if we can do that I’ll be very satisfied.”
New opportunities could involve using existing skills to help industry manage new pests and diseases.
“We’ve got an awful lot of capability here,” he said.
“We can also extend our activities into the pest control areas. We have extensive contracting and management systems for pest control and we work collaboratively with regional councils and the Department of Conservation, but it’s just making sure that again all those things are done most efficiently by working together and perhaps there are opportunities for OSPRI to get involved in helping plan and manage some of that activity.”
Keeping an eye on the process
If you want to make beer, cheese or wood pulp, William McCook explained, you need to work out what to start with and what you want to end up with, and all the steps in the process along the way.
Chemical process engineering is closely akin to problem-solving, he said.
“The key thing, if you are any good at it, is that you can see the overall process end to end and can work out what you want to achieve and the steps that will be required.”
Chemical engineering work, for example, requires decisions on whether you need to apply heat to something, or cool it, filter it, mix it, or pump it.
A process engineer has the knowledge to design all the processing steps and during his career McCook has made rope, beer, cheese, all sorts of things.
It’s the process that fascinates him – the end-to-end process.
Simple advice about a complex problem
William McCook has some simple advice for any farmer who brings animals in and creates a new herd, be it beef or dairy. The risk of Tb, and knowing where the animals have come from and the relative risk they might have some residual Tb infection, must be considered.
In several cases in the last year people brought animals in and then found they were infected with Tb. When herd movements were checked, more cases were found.
The AHB’s 2012-13 annual report showed a spike in infected herds, with 91 herds registered at June 30, 2013.
Dairy farmers must always ask themselves, particularly when they are starting or enlarging a herd, about the risk of Tb, McCook said. They can always contact OSPRI for help or advice.
In recent cases the use of NAIT data has been helpful. OSPRI tested animals on a Northland farm and initially used the farmer’s recollection and other records.
“When we realised the extent of the infection we went back and double checked and we checked the NAIT, and the animals that people thought had been tested weren’t the right animals,” he said.
“When we tracked down the correct animals with the NAIT identification and tested them, we found three of them had Tb. Without the NAIT data we would have had a herd sitting there with Tb animals and people would have been blissfully unaware until something bigger happened.”
McCook called for help from farmers in reinforcing NAIT too.
“They are tagging animals. But we need them to register the tag on the system, we need them to record farm to farm movements, and we need to receipt animals in so we don’t create these pending movements,” he said.
“We have got some very clear, quite simple things that are important to get NAIT working effectively and again the best way we can achieve that is through getting the involvement and support of the industries behind us.”
No loss of momentum
The AHB and NAIT were each set up with a single focus, different but single-minded, OSPRI chief executive William McCook said.
That was okay for the schemes at the time, but leadership of OSPRI involves leading a major programme of change, requiring all staff to be much better informed in order to see where it can add value or create value for its stakeholders.
“A process is underway with staff to identify how we behave and what we do in terms of our culture and our values, to make sure we can actually deliver for the future,” he said.
NAIT was set up with the idea it would become part of something else, so several of its staff are on temporary or fixed contracts. The AHB had also anticipated a merger.
“But any restructuring is never easy because it’s about change and about change of people,” McCook said.
A workable but realistic timeframe was set so the restructuring didn’t stretch on for months.
“That’s a failing you very often see – organisations taking far too long – and we didn’t want to lose any momentum for the Tb scheme or NAIT.”
The focus initially was on cost efficiencies and avoiding duplication. But there was a growing recognition the merger wasn’t just about saving money and being more efficient, McCook said. It was about being a new organisation with a greater capability to do things with a broader mandate.
He believes OSPRI is adequately resourced although Tb scheme funding hasn’t increased since 2002.
This has involved routinely changing the business model and making significant investments in information systems. With NAIT, the merger has generated budget savings of $1.3 million in the first year through savings on duplications and other efficiencies. It was well funded through levies, which have already been reduced and consultations were about to be held about reducing them further.
Tb has been declared eradicated from half a million hectares in the past 18 months. There are plans to eradicate it from 2.5m ha of the 10m ha where OSPRI believes there is infected wildlife. The challenge, with implications for funding, will be deciding the pace of eradication.
“The faster you can do it the better the economic outcome.”
