P.PIP.0761 - Stanbroke beef digital value chain strategy development and digital officer

Summary

Stanbroke is a vertically integrated beef production enterprise that as part of this project reviewed and evaluated options to integrate their data capture and analytical capabilities to align with their data transfer needs. Stanbroke were looking to build expertise and resources to enhance digital capability, specifically through the provision of advanced analytics of datasets in order to gain new insights for the business. The purpose of the project was to develop digital capabilities to enhance productivity through the provision of advanced analytics of data sets to generate new insights across the business.

The specific focus was on livestock production. The project analysed the value in linking existing and new company data with other data sets and mining the data in order to generate value and new opportunities. It was proposed that a Digital Officer be deployed to develop and implement Stanbroke’s digital strategy. The Digital Officer was responsible for management and implementation of all digital initiatives undertaken over the initial three years. This will form one of several case studies required to demonstrate the digital strategies effectively adopted across beef and lamb production enterprises.

Objectives

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 businesses. The primary goal was to provide support in the form a dedicated Digital Officer resource to deliver data capture and analytics processes to allow the Australian Meat and Livestock Industry to define the various processes and required metrics for running farms, feedlots through to processing.

Key findings

Key findings included:
- a clear and documented development stage gave benefits and clarity to all stakeholders
- detailed and accurate audit/map of current digital procedures and technology stack
- on-site peer-to-peer contact was significantly more beneficial than any other form of contact
- staff professional development was key to engagement and productivity gains
- interactions between external industry participants created invaluable connections to collectively work toward a common goal.

Benefits to industry

The Digital Strategy role demonstrated supporting the delivery of impact for industry in this focus area by assisting to increase the efficiency with which data is collected, integrated, analysed and presented for use to decision makers across the supply chain. The co-funded role has contributed toward achievement of a range of key outputs (products) and their value propositions, including:
• economic benefits
• environmental/sustainability benefits
• socialised benefits.
Dashboards are currently being used by the business daily to make decisions.

Multiple industry benefits were witnessed, such as:
- keeping people attached to the industry
- increasing grid performance both internally and externally
- increased ability to manage land systems more effectively
- breaking down barriers to sharing data for mutual benefit.

It is recommended that these roles proceed across a broad range of industry companies with the ability for existing participants to re-engage with the program with a more focused vision. One of the major drawbacks of the program were the short timeframes and physical limitations of how much could be achieved with given resources.

MLA action

There is potential for Stanbroke and MLA to collaborate in the future on a project focused on Value Based Marketing (VBM). This will center around Stanbroke's medium to long-term goals of developing capabilities in digital and data integration across the business.

Future research

he next phase will focus on making improvements to data cleaning and refining the data collection process along with the introduction of new management reporting and software trials. Stanbroke’s medium to long-term goals are to continue to develop capabilities in digital and data integration across the business. This may be part of the soon to be commenced Value Based Marketing (VBM) collaborative project with MLA.