How Camellia Improved Board Meetings with Dess Digital
Easy agenda preparation, better data security and cross-border collaboration for Camellia PLC’s heritage tea business.
Goodricke Group Limited is a leading producer and packager of premium tea, managing a large network of gardens, processing centres and distribution channels. As part of the London based and LSE listed conglomerate Camellia PLC, Goodricke has to meet diverse compliance standards while steering fast moving, day to day operations.
Coordinating meetings across borders using endless emails created unnecessary delays. To solve this, Goodricke did a thorough assessment and selected Dess Digital. By rolling out Dess’ intuitive board portal software, the company moved to paperless meetings, strengthened data protection and made collaboration seamless for directors in both the UK and overseas.
The Challenge: Running Global Board Meetings the Traditional Way
Managing board and committee meetings across different time zones is one of the many operational bottlenecks which Company Secretaries need to manage, especially with globally located directors. Before using a dedicated board management platform, the Camellia’s entity ran into several day-to-day friction points:
- Heavy, Time Consuming Board Books: Compiling stacks of estate updates, financial figures, and sustainability reports meant hours spent in manually organizing and reviewing page numbers and item numbers, creating PDF boardbooks.
- Last Minute Paperwork Updates: When an agenda item shifted or figures changed right before a meeting, manually re-creating, again reviewing the whole file and then circulating the updated pages was slow and made version control difficult.
- Security and Privacy Risks: Camellia PLC follows strict UK data privacy standards, including UK GDPR. Sending confidential company papers over regular email attachments carries avoidable security and compliance risks.
- Directors on the Move: Board members and non-executive directors based in the UK and abroad needed a straightforward, reliable way to read papers securely, even while travelling without Wi-Fi.
The Solution: Switching to Dess Digital Board Portal
After a detailed evaluation, the Camellia’s entity chose Dess Digital for its board operations for both company secretarial teams and directors. The platform gave them a single, secure digital hub:
- Fast Agenda Creation: Company secretaries can now build complete digital meeting books in minutes, complete with auto-generated agendas and bookmarks.
- Enterprise Security: Fingerprint login, multi factor authentication, watermarking, role based permissions and end to end encryption keep sensitive board materials safe.
- Easy-to-Use App: Directors review documents on iPads, Android smartphones, laptops, or desktops with a clean, simple layout. They can highlight text, write notes, share with others and bookmark key sections without requiring any learning.
- Simpler Sign-Offs: Built-in digital approvals, voting and polling, circular resolutions and audit trails make recording formal board decisions quick, transparent and audit ready.
Key Results and Impact
Switching to Dess Digital delivered immediate improvements to Goodricke’s board operations:
| Metric | Before Dess | After Dess |
| Agenda | 14 to 15 days to manually prepare followed by coordination and activities to organize and circulate | Instant preparation with pre-existing templates, all file format uploads, AI support and departmental workflow |
| Sustainability | Hours spent online to prepare plus occasional printing and couriering | 80% online time eliminated plus 100% paperless with zero waste and courier |
| Global Access | Directors in UK and overseas had to re-download documents for every new change | Instant and secure access from anywhere, with full offline reading and auto-updates requiring no downloads |
| Security | Unsecured email threads and PDFs | Central, encrypted hub with access controls |
Cutting out manual preparation freed up hours for the directors and company secretarial team, letting them focus on governance and strategy instead of logistics.
For multinational groups like Camellia PLC, modern board software is essential for staying agile, secure and compliant. Dess Digital gave Goodricke an easy-to-use tool that protects sensitive corporate information while making board meetings run smoothly.
About Dess:
Dess Digital Meetings is the world’s easiest-to-use board portal software for paperless board and committee meetings. Leading organizations in over 25 countries prefer Dess as their choice for efficient and effective board management software.
Dess believes in enhancing the value of information globally by harnessing unstructured data to empower the right people at the right time using the right technology. With its group of highly competent and motivated people, it has implemented several first-of-its-kind solutions.
To know, please write to support@dess.digital