At a glance
Five manufacturing sites across Victoria, including three in Colac and facilities in Mulgrave and Dandenong
Multiple legacy CCTV systems consolidated onto one cloud-managed platform
Remote access from laptops and mobile devices across Bulla’s distributed manufacturing footprint
Video-backed root-cause analysis helps teams understand incidents and identify opportunities for improvement
Secure digital footage sharing replaces cumbersome downloads and USB drives
CompNow deployed Verkada at Bulla’s first two sites, helping simplify implementation and establish a repeatable approach for expansion
A family-owned manufacturer with a growing technology footprint
Bulla Dairy Foods is one of Australia’s oldest and largest family-owned dairy companies. Owned by the same three families since 1910, Bulla has grown from a small cream business into one of the country’s most recognised dairy manufacturers, producing ice cream, cream, yoghurt and cottage cheese across multiple sites in Victoria. For Sean Davies, Head of ICT at Bulla, one of the things that stands out most about the business is its family culture.
“A lot of companies have that built into their culture, but here at Bulla it’s something you live and breathe every day.”
Sean and his team enable technology across Bulla, supporting everything from business insights and service delivery to digital transformation, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. As Bulla continues investing in its manufacturing operations, the team focused on making technology simpler, more connected, and consistent across the organisation.
That push for greater consistency was already underway with long-standing technology partner CompNow. Bulla standardised its employee device fleet on HP laptops through CompNow’s Device as a Service offering, giving employees a more consistent onboarding experience while taking much of the deployment burden off Bulla’s IT team.
The same focus on standardisation soon extended to physical security.
Moving away from fragmented, ageing CCTV systems
Across Bulla’s manufacturing footprint, video supported both traditional site security and day-to-day operations, including food safety, engineering, and maintenance. But the underlying infrastructure had become increasingly difficult to manage.
Different sites relied on different CCTV systems, some of which were ageing. For Bulla’s IT team, that meant supporting multiple platforms while users had a different experience depending on the site.
“One of the challenges we had was the complexity of multiple CCTV solutions, which became unsupportable,” says Sean.
That complexity also showed up when teams needed footage. Reviewing or sharing video could involve downloading files and passing around USB drives, while remote access wasn’t always straightforward.
Bulla wanted one platform that teams across sites could use to access and manage video more easily.
“The main reason for Verkada was around consolidation of solutions,” says Sean. “Having that cloud-based offering allows us to quickly and easily deploy across sites.”
With Verkada Command, Bulla has a central place to manage cameras across sites while giving authorised teams access to live and historical footage from a browser or mobile device. The platform is also designed to scale across distributed deployments as camera and site requirements grow.
Working with CompNow to simplify deployment
Having already worked closely with CompNow on Bulla’s device strategy, Sean turned to the partner again as the company evaluated Verkada.
CompNow brought experience deploying and supporting Verkada environments, helping Bulla deploy the platform at its first two sites and get its new Command environment up and running.
“We chose to go on that path because of their expertise with Verkada, and that helped ease the implementation and setup with a new portal,” says Sean.
For Bulla, the partnership took deployment work off its internal IT team while creating a repeatable approach for future sites.
For end users, accessing video is similarly straightforward. Instead of relying on a workstation tied to a particular site, teams can use Verkada from their laptops or mobile devices.
“The new setup that we have of HP laptops and Verkada systems has been a smooth transition,” says Aetesam Khawaja, Site Lead – Hearn Street Operation. “Very simple to use. You can use it on your mobile phone, you can use it on your laptops.”
Turning video into a tool for production and continuous improvement
With Verkada in place, Bulla began using video beyond security to help engineering, maintenance, and operations teams understand what was happening on the production floor.
When teams need to troubleshoot machinery, Bulla can quickly put a camera in place to get a clearer view of what’s happening.
“It helps us to address engineering and maintenance concerns,” says Sean. “If they have to troubleshoot some machinery, we can get a camera into place very quickly and easily so they can really look into the equipment and understand what’s going on.”
That visual context is equally valuable after an incident.
“Sometimes in an incident, the information gets lost. People forget or we have short memories,” says Aetesam. “But when it’s on a camera, it helps to go back and find those root causes and how we can improve further.”
The Verkada platform also includes tools designed to make finding and investigating footage faster, including motion search, people and vehicle search, and AI-powered search using everyday language. AI-Powered Unified Timeline can bring together relevant activity across multiple cameras to help reconstruct how an incident unfolded.
Instead of relying on memory alone, teams can return to the footage to understand what happened, pinpoint contributing factors, and determine how to improve moving forward.
Giving teams and partners a shared view of what happened
When footage needs to be shared, Bulla can provide secure digital access rather than passing around USB drives.
“Another advantage of Verkada is the ability to share footage quickly and easily with third parties,” says Sean. “Previously the teams would be struggling with downloading content, there would be USB sticks being shared. Now with Verkada, it’s secure access.”
Bulla can control who has access and for how long, making it easier to collaborate with suppliers or other partners when investigating an operational issue.
“When we can show the video, everyone is looking at the same evidence,” says Aetesam. “It gets everyone aligned so we can focus on how to improve.”
A scalable foundation for continued improvement
As Bulla grows, the team can extend the same platform into new areas and sites without needing to scale traditional recorder infrastructure such as NVRs, DVRs, or servers alongside it. Verkada’s hybrid-cloud architecture is designed around onboard storage and centralised cloud management rather than separate recorder infrastructure.
“It’s a very scalable system,” says Aetesam. “As the business grows and we need visibility into more areas, we can simply add more cameras.”
CompNow remains a technology partner as Bulla’s environment evolves. Beyond standardising employee devices and helping deploy Verkada, CompNow works with Sean and his team to explore other ways to simplify technology across the business.
“CompNow have been a good partner in bringing some ideas to the table,” says Sean. “My relationship with Scott continually explores other options and opportunities, and we will work together on those in the future.”
For Bulla, standardising employee technology and video security has reduced complexity for IT while giving manufacturing teams more direct access to the footage they need.
Aetesam describes Verkada as a “backbone” for improving performance — helping teams understand what happened, learn from it, and use that context to keep improving.
