The Australian Beef Cattle Digital Supply Chain Proof of Concept (PoC) aimed to understand if a digital platform leveraging spatial information, could transform the Australian Beef Industry. The current beef cattle supply chain is not integrated and has limited transparency and traceability, resulting in inefficiency and waste. The PoC explored how a digital platform could standardise and facilitate information flow and provided insights into sustainable benefits for operators if they adopted the system.
Through our Australian Livestock Spatial Innovation Program (ALSIP), FrontierSI brought together Ernst and Young (EY), Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and Meat and Livestock Australia. EY assembled key industry stakeholders from both supply and demand sides of the sector to collaborate on the initiative. They worked in partnership with the QUT statistical research to take advantage of the data analytics expertise.
The PoC provided a compelling case for developing Australia’s Beef Cattle Digital Supply Chain. Results indicated a digital solution in combination with predictive analytics can drive performance efficiencies in both the primary production and processing sectors, improving the long-term sustainability of the sector. A minimum viable product is currently being developed with additional partners. Spatial technology and information — for example normalised difference vegetation index and meteorological forecasting — to inform biomass predictions and geolocation of cattle within the supply chain, will be key to both the analytics underlying the decision making, and in visualising decision making, supply chain information and analysis.