P.PSH.1215 - Developing Australian Country Choice’s capability to implement a marketing strategy using data and insights (Markets)

Summary

The project is designed to support the development and implementation of ACC’s marketing strategy in both the domestic and global markets. The specific focus of the program is the utilisation of data, insights and design led innovation approaches to develop data capture, storage and reporting and monitoring systems to support the business to identify new markets and customers to drive profitability – in particular, to drive high value beef exports.

Objectives

• Participate in the development of a comprehensive ACC marketing strategy across the key business priority areas identified above.
• Assist in developing and monitoring key performance indicators and other measures of impact as agreed.
• Ongoing synthesis, analysis and interpretation of data and information from multiple sources, spanning supply and demand.
• Demonstrate thought leadership across markets that is relevant and anticipatory in nature.
• Increase ACC business knowledge and adoption of data and insights to inform strategy.
• Develop whole of supply chain data systems to assist with decision making.

Key findings

ACC can now draw on the data and insights generated on-farm and in the processing plant to fine-tune their beef marketing strategy.
During this project, a forecasting tool and carcase utilisation model was developed to manage sales and other commitments in advance. This means ACC’s beef products can be more proactively managed to minimise unnecessary expenses, and sales to new customers can be optimised.

Benefits to industry

Linking data from farm to processing facility to market has supported better insights about the impact of practices and processes across the supply chain to drive improved decision making.

For ACC, this data works to optimise performance drivers through the supply chain to ensure the business remains sustainable, and produces high-quality, consistent products every time.

This project has demonstrated how data can be collected, integrated and analysed efficiently, and used to make more informed decisions across the supply chain.

Key areas other red meat business operators could focus on to capture efficiencies from data include:

• using individual cattle data to measure overall emissions intensity
• improving animal fertility and performance to reduce emissions intensity
• aligning product with consumer expectations
• lowering production costs through greater efficiencies
• the ability to demonstrate animal welfare and wellbeing practices
• combining data from other tools – such as satellite imagery and predictive modelling for pasture biomass, rainfall and feed availability – to link livestock production data with environmental production data.

MLA action

• Publish interim and final report and develop communications plan to publish the final report.
• Produce supply chain video to highlight learnings for industry.
• Assist with other project to build on learnings – data science and whole of life data base concept.

Future research

ACC will conduct market and channel scans and review business strategy prior to progressing to a go/no go decision relating to a brand development program. MLA will support a data deep dive through a service provider (QUT) to identify the drivers of production (profit) and to see if there are any predicative capabilities can be identified/developed in the data. Another potential project with Telstra/IBM would like to prove whole of life data can be captured, stored and analysed via a single industry platform.

There is no need for MLA to invest in Co-Innovation managers in this area at ACC after this project.