BREEDPLAN: an evaluation of new business models for breed societies

Summary

This report is the final report from a significant and consultative review into the business models that currently deliver BREEDPLAN – Australia’s premier beef cattle quantitative genetics evaluation service - to the Australian beef industry.
The review identifies a strong industry desire for the current BREEDPLAN delivery framework to change, including significantly in some respects, and sets out recommendations as to the changes that are required to meet commercial and seedstock producer and breed association needs and, ultimately, to deliver a more competitive quantitative genetics service to Australian beef cattle producers.

Objectives

The objectives of this review are to identify changes that can be made to the business models that currently delivery BREEDPLAN to market to render it a more competitive product in the marketplace, ensuring the impact of competition is minimised and BREEDPLAN can continue to make a significant contribution toward Meat and Livestock Australia’s (MLA) objective of doubling the rate of genetic gain in the Australian beef industry.

Key findings

The analysis and consultation in this review has identified eleven key perceived issues and constraints that serve to compromise the effectiveness of BREEDPLAN in the marketplace:

• Transactional approach to breed association and other customer engagement
• Deteriorating quality of ABRI software and customer service
• Deteriorating quality of support from SBTS and TBTS
• Misaligned and lagging innovation in product development and R&D
• Waning promotion of BREEDPLAN
• Perceptions as to the technical veracity of BREEDPLAN
• Clearer perspective on a BREEDPLAN multibreed evaluation
• Cost of BREEDPLAN

Nine recommendation actions were also developed which included:
• An immediate review of AGBU and ABRI
• BREEDPLAN Innovation Steering Group
• BREEDPLAN Research Priorities Plan
• Set funding allocations and co-investment
• Multilateral research contracts
• BREEDPLAN Marketing Taskforce
• Revitalised BREEDPLAN marketing campaign
• Agreement on the pathway to a multibreed evaluation
• Multibreed evaluation implementation planning and feasibility

Benefits to industry

The identification of change that can be made to the business model that currently deliver BREEDPLAN to render it a more competitive product.

Minimise the threatening of fragmentation of the Australian beef quantitative genetics database.

MLA action

Work with the other commercialisers and the BREEDPLAN owners to implement the recommendations in the report.

Future research

Further work is required to action the recommendations that have come from this final report.