Hitachi-MLA Co-Innovation officer

Summary

Australian Country Choice (ACC) and Australian Cattle and Beef Holdings (ACBH) wanted to develop digital capability, specifically through the provision of advanced analytics of individual animal datasets in order to gain new insights for the business. Hitachi Consulting Australia (HCC) was engaged to provide solutions and services in digital transformation.

The project supported a Innovation Officer to facilitate innovation in data and process analytics, leveraging the global capabilities of Hitachi to develop a Cattle Management Intelligence System (CMI). The development process used Agile Project Methodology.

The development of this system was a major step forward in individual animal management and analytics. This achievement has now paved the way for further innovation across the extended value chain.

Objectives

The primary objective of this project was to evaluate the feasibility and commercial options of data capture, management and analytics across the businesses.

The overall objective of this work was to develop a digital strategy and evaluate the feasibility and commercial options of data capture, management and analytics across the businessessed the ACC learnings as a capability building and practice change case study to broader industry.

Key findings

• The development and implementation of the Cattle Management System has created significant opportunities for ACC to analyze data and make better decisions.
• The Cattle Management Intelligence system ingests crush side data from all properties and prepares daily cattle records, stock movement advices, paddock books and the other management reports such as purchase, transfer and sales report as well as inventory reconciliation reports. These reports were historically developed and processed manually via Excel spreadsheets and a Access Data Bases.
• Implementation of the system has also identified that change management will be fundamental to capture the full potential value of the system staff and management at all levels need to understand and see the benefits of supporting the system.
• To optimize the value to the business and broader industry an end to end solution needs to be developed - Farm, feedlot, factory, market and operators at each step of the chain need to be trained to use the system.

Benefits to industry

The project reinforces the importance of process and systems, for example the need to develop a digital strategy and evaluate the feasibility and commercial options of data capture, management and analytics across the businesses.

It highlights the importance of change management and support to implement a project of this size and outlines the need for continuous innovation and improvement and the potential competitive advantage a fully operation end to end data system can deliver.

MLA action

MLA will work with ACC to identify how to incorporate broader data measures to create a point of difference for the business, i.e. CN30 validation, feedback / feedforward quality systems that could ultimately form the basis of a value based marketing program.

Future research

The business intends to further develop systems to create end to end connectivity across the business. They can then use systems and data to better predict animal performance and quality to make better and quicker production decisions.