P.PSH.1267 - Pardoo Beef Digital Officer
| Project start date: | 31 August 2020 |
| Project end date: | 28 February 2023 |
| Publication date: | 09 May 2024 |
| Project status: | Completed |
| Livestock species: | Grass-fed Cattle |
| Relevant regions: | Western Australia |
Summary
This project covered the engagement of a full-time digital value chain officer resource for two years within Pardoo Beef Corporation business to drive the adoption of enhance digital capability, specifically through the provision of advanced analytics of data sets in order to generate new insights for the business.
Objectives
The key objective of this project was to gather, calculate and visually represent data on Cost of Gain at every step of the value chain. i.e., establishing the cost of:
• every kg gained
• at each step of the Pardoo process (rangeland, yards, pivots, feedlot)
• updated on a quarterly basis.
This will result in Pardoo having world-class ability to manage costs at every level of the supply chain and have greater predictability of revenue at the end through making better decisions for every animal, every kg and every dollar.
Key findings
Through bringing together important cost and production data and visualising it in a way that was accessible, several key findings were identified across Pardoo’s operations:
• Pardoo’s long-term ADG on Pivots was calculated across a two-year period from Jan 2020–Dec 2021. Original business plans assumed the ADG on pivots was higher. This had several strategic implications for how Pardoo manages its Pivot operations.
• There were clear seasonal trends on ADG but not as much as initially thought – it was found that the seasonal trend on the pivots is much greater than that of the nearby yard operation.
• Top-down cost of gain approach broadly matches the bottom-up approach on a three month rolling basis.
Benefits to industry
There were many key lessons discovered as part of this project which have applications for the broader industry, the top three being:
• Culture eats tech for breakfast – you cannot successfully complete a digital adoption project without a strong focus on culture. People drive the collection of data and if they are not bought into the process, you will not have accurate, reliable data to visualise.
• People, process, tech… then process again – Whilst automation is the end goal, it is very unlikely you will end in a place that does not require some human intervention and manual handling. It is important to implement detailed processes once tech has been implemented to ensure that data collection and integration is properly managed and any key person risk is avoided.
• Fit the tech to the business, not the other way around – Trying to implement new technology that does not match current business processes is likely to fail as people will not embrace new technology that significantly impacts, instead of alleviates, their day-to-day work.
MLA action
Some of the generic dashboard designs have been used to inform other companies looking to develop their own reporting capabilities.
Future research
To continue building Pardoo’s knowledge management system and gathering lessons for the broader industry to undertake this journey, Pardoo would need to look at (1) improving Pardoo’s IT infrastructure (2) Extending management dashboards to cover Pardoo’s other properties and (3) Building forecasting capabilities for Pardoo to better manage herd size growth, revenue forecasting, genetic improvement, and animal management.
In terms of the broader industry, there are two recommendations to help other producers apply these lessons to their businesses:
1. Industry training session/s to share the lessons listed in section 5.2, providing practical examples of their application, and answer any questions the industry has on how they can begin or progress their digital transformation journey.
2. Apprise other integrated livestock producers of the project findings to continue the cutting-edge work proven out at Pardoo Wagyu and encourage the rest of the Australian Livestock industry to use digital tools to improve their profitability, resilience, and environmental impact.
More information
| Project manager: | Demelsa Lollback |
| Contact email: | reports@mla.com.au |
| Primary researcher: | Pardoo Beef Corporation Pty Ltd |
