Pig production
Delta-innovation has worked closely with BPEX to develop the Work-Metrics system for use in the pig industry. This is capable of handling data from all types of pig-farming set up, including indoor and outdoor set-ups and continuous, three-week and five-week batch farrowing.
What Work-Metrics does?
The Work-Metrics programme provides a detailed analysis of labour use and labour efficiency on farms. Work-Metrics analyses efficiencies at task-level, and it standardises results according to common outputs e.g. piglets weaned from the breeder herd, and kg liveweight gain from the finishing herd.
Work-Metrics analysis includes individual staff-costs, so it allows for an accurate picture to be built of the staff-costs of production for each activity on the farm. This allows the user to focus on improving the efficiency of those tasks for which savings can most easily be made.
Why?
Farming is a 365 day/year activity and small daily savings can rapidly build up to large annual savings. Half an hour per day at the minimum wage, excluding employer’s National Insurance contributions, equates to just over £1,000 per year. So a small investment to analyse where staff savings can be made can lead to a rapid and significant return.
Benefits can be found for participating farms in reducing inefficiencies, maximising outputs "per labour unit" and appraising investment decisions.
- Identifying inefficiencies or places where time input can be reduced without affecting productivity.
- For personnel management, questioning whether staff time could be reduced, or whether productivity could be increased with the same staff levels?
- For planning and improving, benchmarking against other farms to see what the scope for improvement is.
- For investment decisions, examining potential cost-savings from changes to staff inputs.
- For family-farms, identifying where the risks of exceptionally high costs might impact should family labour become unavailable.
How does it work?
The Work-Metrics programme is simple to run. We provide task-diaries, to be completed by all staff working on the unit including management and family labour, and we provide instructions on their completion. Task-diaries have been designed to be used by all levels of farm labour, and can be made available in any language. At the same time, we collect some background data on the farm, its size, structure and outputs.
The farm uses these task-diaries to record all labour inputs for a given period of time (e.g. one week for continuous farrowing systems, and three weeks for three-week batch farrowing systems) and returns the completed diaries to us. We use this labour-input data together with the background data to undertake detailed analyses of labour use and labour efficiency, including a comparison of the farm’s figures to the industry averages.
Analysed labour data is provided to view in terms of total times per task, times per unit output (e.g. time spent on daily farrowing routine per 100 piglets weaned), and costs per unit output (e.g. costs of mucking out per 1000 kg liveweight gain). The labour input from each individual member of staff can also be examined.
For a copy of a farm-report for a pig or dairy farm, for further details of how the work-metrics programme works, or to find out how you or your customers might benefit from detailed farm labour analysis, contact either Steve Webster or Adam Harper.
