Living Turf

With data often described as the soil of the digital age, we ensure Living Turf’s business has a rich foundation for growth.

Living Turf was founded in 2003. It’s a growing business operating in the highly specialised area of agronomy – the science of soil management and turf and crop production that improves yield, quality, and sustainability in the industry.

Living Turf works specifically in the turf sector, providing advice, technical support, and product supplies to organisations that are responsible for managing the turf found on our local golf courses, parklands, sports fields, and racing tracks. They also work with the turf farms who deliver quality turf to all these locations.

As Chief Technical Officer at Living Turf, Henk Smith leads the Research and Development Team, who looks after the creation of innovative tools, products, and software that improve the quality of turf, from seeding and growth, through to implementation and ongoing maintenance.

A suite of six automated applications and modules to support the business

The principle behind Living Turf’s business, is that turf becomes much easier to manage with the right data.

In recent years, digital technologies for turf management have been developed to support agronomists, like Living Turf, enabling it to leverage these technologies into comprehensive tools, products, and services for its clients.

During this time, Living Turf has partnered with the Turbineers to deliver the engine room of Living Turf’s digital transformation. It’s a process that is seeing the ongoing optimisation of Living Turf’s digital operations and the platforms that support communications and collaboration with clients and suppliers.

The output of this collaboration is a family of six decision-making applications and modules that underpin business operations. They enable the Living Turf team to make the right ergonomic decisions.

This includes Living Turf’s Safety Data Sheets (SDS), Compliance Documentation, automated Tool Box meetings, the tracking and tracing of all Trademarks, and the development, submission and tracking of Tenders and Submissions. Also included is a company-wide Consulting Job Board that lists and profiles all consulting projects being tendered on, won, and carried out across the country.

Ensuring effective health and safety, and related compliance

“Because we’ve been expanding into consulting services and supporting people who manage public open spaces, such as passive parks and sports fields, a larger part of our role has been to ensure they stay safe and operational, with appropriate the regulation and compliance framework in place” explains Henk.

The Safety Data Sheets (SDS) are an important information-sharing service delivered by Living Turf. They provide detailed information on the properties of each substance used in Living Turf’s products, including potential hazards, safe usage guidelines, and emergency response measures. They also play a crucial role in ensuring the safe handling, storage, and use of chemicals and products in the turf.

“These data sheets are essential for educating staff, ensuring compliance with safety regulations, and minimising risks to health and the environment. They also help our clients manage chemicals responsibly, protect workers, and ensure legal compliance with health and safety standards,” explains Henk.

The Compliance Documentation then cuts across all the Safety Data Sheets to ensure all safe work procedures and safety management protocols comply with health and safety regulations.
All Data Sheets and related Compliance Documentation are shared with clients and published through the website, via the resource library. Here, clients can search for and download information on specific products.
Tool Box has been developed to manage meetings relating operational health, safety, and compliance to ensure everyone is staying on top of the important procedures. It brings together all relevant client information and documentation into meeting agendas, and then manages the output of the meetings to ensure the team stays on track for action items.

Henk Smith explains: “Previously the processes required to develop, manage and update all these systems relied on manual data management processes carried out by our own team of people.

“Now that we’ve automated these processes with the Turbineers, every product we use, or supply is registered and is fully compliant. Our Project Managers don’t have to worry about managing Safety Data Sheets as they’re all updated and published automatically.”

Driving the tenders and submissions process

The Tenders and Submissions platform at Living Turf is essential. The Turbineers have used the Power Platform to automate and streamline the approach for responding to Government tenders.

When a new tender opportunity comes into the business, it’s logged in Dynamics 365. The Living Turf team can then automatically assign tasks to its sales and marketing team members so they can start working on the proposal.

Power Apps are used to generate the proposal document, pulling in data from Dynamics 365 into a template. As the proposal is developed it’s routed through an automated approval workflow until it’s submitted to the client and scheduled for follow-ups and next steps.

“Thanks to the Turbineers and the platforms they’ve developed for us our tender submission process is easier and more efficient, with less stress place on teams. It’s now a highly efficient process that has improved the effectiveness of our tenders and submissions process, which ultimately impacts the overall growth, performance, and profitability of the business,” explains Henk.

Enabling more effective outcomes from internal systems

“One of the most effective platforms we use internally is our Unify proprietary turf management platform,” explains Henk.

“The platform integrates data from different sources, such as soil health, weather conditions, and irrigation systems. It then provides our turf managers with a complete view of the turf health. From these environmental data inputs, the turf managers can make the right treatment decisions.”

The data gathering and processing functionality of this platform has also been automated by the Turbineers, using PowerBI on the Microsoft Power Platform.

“The Turbineers platforms give us an accurate and reliable, single source of truth in our data, which ensures we have good traceability of data through all our operations. So the decision-making platforms we and our clients use, can be relied on to make the right decisions,” says Henk.