Transporting livestock for breeding: complying with health regulations

Transporting animals for breeding from farm to farm, minimizing the time they spend on trucks, involves intricate moves to ensure their health and wellbeing. First, you have a short window for collection and delivery.

Planning involves coordinating welfare regulations with time windows, sanitary controls, varying farm visiting times and rules, the order animals are transported in for disease control, and of course, last-minute changes.

If you’re exporting live animals for any reason, you need an export health certificate (EHC) to confirm that the stock meets the health requirements of the destination country. With so many details to attend to, planning is complex. For the good of the animals and your margins, you must work efficiently. The question is, how?

The answer: scalable, cloud-based technology

Specifically, what you need to simplify the complex is the rich functionality of the best-in-class AMCS Livestock Planner. Designed for the industry and the challenges you face, it can make your job easier and reduce your operational costs. It plans according to time windows, capacity limits, access conditions and a number of other qualifications.

Let’s take a closer look.

Viral pathogens threaten livestock

Complex viral interactions pose a serious threat to animals for breeding. This is why trucks have to be cleaned and disinfected after every completed route and quarantined for 12 hours before executing in the morning.

Farms are visited according to the disease category schedule throughout the day. The least infected stock is picked up first and gradually work towards picking up animals in the most infected areas. This order minimizes the time infected animals are exposed to the others.

Planning this schedule is no easy feat. It can be, however. AMCS Livestock Planner optimizes the schedule, providing a base plan and allowing your planners to take on other tasks.

Last-minute orders

Orders come in from breeders for the collection and delivery of livestock. These orders have to happen that day, but your trucks are already out executing orders. Handing off these orders to the nearest trucks isn’t cut and dry due to animal health and welfare regulations.

AMCS Livestock Planner performs automatic insertion of these last-minute orders into the plan. If any orders create potential problems or regulatory issues, warnings appear on screen. This is because AMCS Planner is configured for local and regional regulations. We can take it a step further by customizing it with additional parameters, such as health grading, monitoring and data collection, which will increase your efficiency even more.

But not only will AMCS Livestock Planner warn you when you break regulations. It will offer suggestions on what to do instead. Without those warnings and suggestions, you could be creating bigger problems for yourself and the animals.

This is how you work efficiently.

Algorithms do the heavy lifting

Advanced algorithms continuously update planning and routing schedules all day as more information becomes available. It keeps the schedule flexible, even though complex parameters are involved. The purpose of AMCS Livestock Planner is far more reaching than minimizing travel time for breeding animals and monitoring delays. It’s about smarter, more efficient ways of working.

It plans according to animal and health grading to control degradation and transparency, and route around quarantined areas according to the latest information.

The power of data

You can connect to your trucks and collect operational data for reporting and analysis. That data can range from distances traveled to time spent on trucks to health degradation and unplanned offloading and on loading. You can generate reports and analyze the data in order to gain deeper insights into operations. This insight shows you where you can create efficiencies.

AMCS Livestock Planner users report:

• Significant reduction in overall transport costs, from 5% – 25% on average
• A centralized planning process including planning across regions
• An 80% automatic planning process
• Instant calculation of the consequences of manual actions
• Automatic warnings if the planners break any rules
• No lost or overlooked orders
• Increasing overall transport and quality of customer service
• The ability to make simulations with various cost models

Webinar:

Breeding animals: How to comply with health regulations in livestock transport

We can help you with state-of-the-art technology to ensure the welfare of breeding animals and lower operating costs. This is how you expand margins. Watch a demonstration of AMCS Livestock Planner and learn from the example of one company that got ahead with our help.