Key Information
JBS Australia is the country’s largest meat and food processing company. Its beef feedlot operation carries around 150,000 cattle at any one time across six feedlots. The focus is to produce quality, highly marbled grain-fed beef for export.
AbacusBio has worked with JBS Australia since 2001 (Australia Meat Holdings, at the time), analysing supply chain data and providing solutions to improve predictability of performance in its cattle feedlot business.
Challenge: Improving supply chain predictability
Biological systems are inherently variable, making it difficult to forecast the performance of different lines of cattle, even in a feedlot environment with seemingly identical inputs.
AbacusBio worked with JBS Australia’s feedlot division to build systems enabling it to:
- Better manage its inventory of cattle entering into and leaving its feedlots, and
- Provide more accurate data around meat quality and timing to its operations and marketing teams, so they could better meet buyers’ specifications.
Key Outcomes
1. Farmer supplier performance
The first AbacusBio project involved analysing the historical performance of cattle purchased from individual farmer suppliers, known as “vendors. Vendors were ranked based on how well their cattle marbled, how quickly they grew, the amount of saleable meat they produced, and their overall profitability in the JBS Australia feedlot system.
Drawing on cattle performance data for each farmer vendor over the previous five years, AbacusBio used a type of genetic evaluation analysis to rank the farmers. Essentially, the farmer was treated as if he had a single bull producing all of the animals supplied to JBS Australia over the period and – in this way – a sire/vendor ranking was generated.
This allowed JBS Australia’s cattle buyers to make informed purchasing decisions. They knew which vendors reliably provided highly-marbled and high-yielding, quality animals – and, equally, which vendors’ animals normally performed poorly in the feedlot.
2. Inventory management
Knowing the timing and quality of finishing for different vendors’ animals allowed the company to optimise the forecasting of cattle moving off the feedlots and onto processing. In turn, JBS Australia’s marketing team knew in advance if it was on track to meet buyers’ orders on time and to specification.
AbacusBio developed an optimisation system that predicts the flow of cattle onto processing. The software delivers a result in minutes, while the former manual method took days to calculate a result that was suitable.
The same software can be used to test scenarios where input costs vary. For example, what impact do changing grain prices or exchange rate have on allocations of cattle to processing and overall profitability.
