How to eliminate staff errors on the farm

We continue to reveal the topic of the influence of personnel on the result of a dairy farm. We communicate with many representatives of agribusiness and often come across the opinion of farmers, especially Russian ones, that despite the technologies introduced, employees continue to work incorrectly.

A dairy farm is a complex enterprise and for the systematization of its activities it makes sense to prescribe standards and rules in order to exclude wrong actions. This can be implemented in the docs:

• Job descriptions,
• Safety instructions,
• Rules and regulations for the care of animals,
• Regulations on control procedures and measurements,
• Equipment instructions.

It turns out that, in fact, all processes on the farm are regulated: starting with the ratio of feed and additives in the diet of animals, and ending with the frequency of cleaning the farm.

It is assumed that the personnel who enter the work, first become familiar with all the necessary documents, the peculiarities of work on the farm, and then begin to work and do their work correctly and efficiently.

In practice, after briefing and training, many processes are performed not according to the regulations, but as shown by more experienced employees or how it will turn out. Not to mention the fact that safety measures and many other documents are often studied by an employee only on paper.

The fact remains - often people do not follow the instructions, resulting in the errors that we talked about in previous articles. The reasons can be different:

• Employees are not interested in the result,
• Employees don't know how to do their job correctly,
• Employees hope that someone else will monitor them,
• Employees think that automation will correct mistakes.

Therefore, on the part of the owner of a modern dairy farm, for high-quality work of the staff, 2 points must be observed:

1) An ongoing process of training and professional development. Over time, a person loses knowledge - he forgets something, does something differently and begins to think that this is how it should be. It is necessary to maintain the level of professional knowledge to eliminate the factor of ignorance.

2) Monitoring compliance with regulations. This motivates employees to comply with work standards, as well as allows timely action and correction of errors almost instantly.

We have implemented an alert feature in our Dairy Production Analytics (DPA) analytics service. If something goes wrong on the farm: the feeding or milking intervals are violated, the temperature regime is not observed, the responsible employee receives an SMS or e-mail with a description of the error. If no corrective action has been taken, a notification is sent to the manager and then to the farm owner.

If you want to control the work of staff and increase efficiency on a dairy farm - write to us at info@smart4agro.com or leave a request on the website.