Case Study

Radical transparency: how Solving Plastic Waste CRC gives its partners a live view of their investment.

At a glance

Organisation: Solving Plastic Waste CRC

Sector: Research collaboration / circular economy

Solution: turnKeyRM and Salesforce CRM, with Plastics 360 partner portal (Salesforce Experience Cloud) and merge-driven PDF reporting

Focus: Giving partners self-service access to their life-to-date cash and in-kind position, fund utilisation and cash leverage

Every partner can access the Plastics 360 portal to see how much of their funds have been allocated to projects and how much they have available to fund additional projects in SPW CRC. It’s also a great tool for tracking their in-kind contribution progress. Marcelle Collins, Head of Finance, Solving Plastic Waste CRC.

The Challenge

Established 1 July 2024 as a ten-year Cooperative Research Centre, Solving Plastic Waste CRC brings together a broad partner ecosystem: manufacturers, processors, recyclers, universities, research institutions, councils and government agencies. Together they shared a collective ambition to build a circular economy for plastics in Australia. With more than $120 million in combined Commonwealth funding and partner contributions committed across the life of the Centre, the CRC coordinates a complex web of cash and in-kind commitments that flow in from, and back out to, dozens of participating organisations.

That complexity created a familiar problem for a research collaboration of this scale. Partners commit significant cash and in-kind resources over multiple years, but they often have limited visibility into how those commitments were tracking. Answering a partner's reasonable questions:

• How much have we contributed to date?
• How much of our funding has been utilised?
• What has our cash actually leveraged across the program?

means CRC back-office staff often have to manually assemble figures from finance systems and project records into bespoke spreadsheets.

Doing so is slow, resource-intensive reporting, a single point of dependency on a small central team. This way partners cannot easily see their own position when they need it. For organisations making strategic decisions about their ongoing engagement, such lag matters.

The tool in Plastics 360 has saved us hours each quarter in collating all of our partner in-kind contributions. Lisa Elliott, Chief Operating Officer, Solving Plastic Waste CRC.

The solution: turnKeyRM and Plastics 360

Solving Plastic Waste CRC implemented turnKeyRM as the system of record for its partner, project and contribution data: capturing cash and in-kind commitments, drawdowns and program activity in one place rather than across disconnected files.

On top of that foundation, turnKeyRM delivered two complementary ways for partners to see their engagement, both drawing from the same governed data.

1. Plastics 360: the live partner dashboard. Built on Salesforce Experience Cloud, Plastics 360 gives each partner a secure, self-service portal into their own position. Rather than static reports, partners see a set of charts that update as the underlying data changes, including:

• Life-to-date cash and in-kind position: a running picture of what the partner has committed and contributed since joining the program, cash and in-kind shown side by side.
• Utilisation of partner funds: how much of a partner's committed funding has been drawn down and deployed against program activity.
• Cash leverage: what each partner's cash contribution has unlocked across the broader CRC, making the multiplier effect of their investment visible.

Because Plastics 360 leverages turnKeyRM, partners do not wait on the central team for a snapshot. They log in and see their current position, presented consistently for every partner across the ecosystem.

2. Merge-driven PDF and Excel reports: the detail behind the charts. Alongside the dashboard, turnKeyRM built a set of PDF and Excel -based report templates that merge data directly from the system. These Partner Quarterly Overviews expand on the charts in Plastics 360, setting out the detailed line-item data that makes up each partner's cash and in-kind position, utilisation and leverage figures.

Crucially, because the figures merge straight from turnKeyRM into the document, the numbers are not massaged or re-keyed by hand. What a partner reads in their quarterly overview is the same governed data that drives their dashboard: a single source of truth in two formats. The reports are designed as clean, shareable documents that a partner can circulate internally within their own organisation, giving finance, research and executive stakeholders a trustworthy record without anyone re-building it in a spreadsheet.

The outcome: radical transparency

Together, Plastics 360 and the merged quarterly overviews give partners radical transparency into their engagement with the CRC program.

The shift is both operational and strategic. Operationally, reporting that once required manual assembly by a central team is now delivered on demand and on a consistent quarterly cadence, freeing CRC staff to focus on the research mission rather than data wrangling. The dependency on a single point of reporting is gone, and the risk of transcription error that comes with hand-built spreadsheets goes with it.

Strategically, the impact is larger. When a partner can see (at any time) their life-to-date position, how much of their funding has been utilised and what their cash has leveraged across the Centre, they are far better placed to make informed decisions about their ongoing involvement. Transparency into the numbers becomes transparency into value: partners can weigh their return, plan future contributions, and make the internal case for continued engagement with data they trust because it comes straight from the source.

From an operational perspective, we hope that this tool we have helped to develop through turnKey provides flexibility and clarity for our partners on their project and funding information in SPW CRC. Lisa Elliott, Chief Operating Officer, SPW CRC.

For a collaboration built on the contributions of many partners working toward a shared goal, that visibility is more than a convenience. It reinforces the trust and accountability that hold the partnership together. It means every organisation at the table can see, clearly and continuously, exactly what their investment in solving plastic waste is achieving.