Apply "Best Practices" to Livestock Production Centers Part 2
Editor's note: This article continues a new series on the "best practices" FBS users have developed to improve effectiveness, efficiency, internal control and compliance from their information system.
Stages and Farms
Modern, large-scale livestock systems can achieve "best practices" for accessible and meaningful reports and simplified data entry by organizing livestock production centers into a standardized hierarchy based on three levels. Last month we examined the first level--Type--which classifies livestock flows as either Breeding, Group or Continuous Flow.
This month we "drill down" to the next two levels: Stage and Farm.
Level II: Stage
Generally stages represent the phase in an animal's production cycle. Examples built into FBS include:
- Breeding(Swine or Beef)
- Nursery
- Finishing
- Steers
- Heifers
- Mixed (Miscellaneous category)
- Transfer (Specialized temporary stage)
- Dairy
- Dry Stage
- Transition
- Lactation
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| Figure 1. Stage setup in the FBS Center screen. |
FBS E.CLIPSE management accounting requires each livestock production center to be associated with a specific Stage in the Center setup screen. (See Figure 1.) These stage settings direct the flow of work-in-process (WIP) costs throughout the production "assembly line."
Level III: Farm
All livestock operations--regardless of size--will have one or more production centers associated with Type (Stage I) and Stage (Stage II). However, larger more complex operation require another dimension: Farm.
"Farms" are identified in most production systems by unique location, ownership and occasionally stage. Farms are often associated with contract growers.
So for accurate accounting and meaningful analysis, you must create livestock production center (farms) for every combination of stage and grower/owner. For example, if a grower owns both a nursery and a finisher two production centers are required since they represent different production stages. Livestock centers, though, don't have to be defined for each physical location (barns, floors or rooms) since that level of detail is tracked through FBS Location codes (which we'll cover later.)
Large livestock producers have developed various best practices for accessing and reporting their companies' stages and farms. Here are several real-life examples.
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| Figure 2. Three-digit system where nursery centers begin with "2," finishers with "4," and wean-finish with"5." |
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| Figure 3. Alpha codes represent grower names. Breeding centers begin with "2," Nursery with "1" and finishing with "3." |
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| Figure 4. The fourth digit (1) identifies breeding centers in this company. |
Regardless of how you arrange your farms and stages in your center list, make sure you follow these "best practices:"
1. Use the same number of characters for all livestock production center codes.
2. To expedite data entry and reporting don't make the codes any longer or more complicated than necessary.
3. Use one of those characters to designate the stage.
4. This standardized approach will allow the use of "wild cards" for filtering reports by stage. In Figure 2, finishers can be selected by entering "4??." Nurseries can be retrieved in Figure 3 by entering "1???."
Next time we'll begin covering best practices for support centers.
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