How Big Data will change egg production

Turning the masses of data into valuable information is a tedious job that takes an increasing amount of time in egg-grading and packing offices around the world. Office employees are manually collecting grader printouts, feeding them into excel sheets, in order to produce insightful graphs. Consolidated grading information will change the industry.

Making management information out of grading data

Industry 4.0 (see Industry 4.0 information below) will not only provide services that turn grading data into management information, but will also correlate efficiency in egg production with things like climate, flock size, housing system, layer type and even packaging.

Industry 4.0

The industrial revolution was marked as a 3-step process. First came the invention of the steam engine, which provided energy and movement that set off industrialisation. Next, electricity became widely available, and enabled mass production.

Step 3 was the introduction of electronics, with programmable devices such as PLCs, to name a powerful example. Recently scientists have come to agree on a 4th step, which is referred to as Industry 4.0: our next industrial revolution is taking place in cyberspace, and is all about the magical things that can be achieved with large quantities of data (‘Big Data’) and the many billion machines and devices that produce and use this data (‘The Internet of Things’). iMoba is one of the first services for the egg industry that capitalises on exactly this development.

Industry leaders will initiate these first steps and help their direct customers:

• Raw data produced by a grader is stored in a private cloud. This enables services to grow in functionality over time, without the need for updating the machines: all relevant data is already in the cloud.
• Apps will take care of “data crunching,” yielding insightful graphs and overviews within milliseconds. You only need an internet connection to interact with your information.
• Sensitive data will be private and highly secured.
• Some anonymous statistics will be available to the industry. At first this will help manufacturers of equipment to improve next designs of equipment and software.
• In the 4th industrial revolution, it will provide benchmark information to compare your performance against the “rest of the world”.

The first step in a long journey

The iMoba service provides insight in the performance of an egg grading machine and of the production process over time. In case of machine breakdown, it can easily indicate the underlying cause. Indicators show to what extent production targets are reached, and where there is room for process optimisation.

As Figure 1 shows, an increasing number of eggs are processed via modern computerised egg graders. Moba foresees functions that zoom in on farm management, production management and equipment service. Beyond that, improvements along the supply chain are envisioned. If for instance shell strength would be compared with breed of layer, housing system or feed composition, a vast range of new insights will present itself.

As soon as more industrial professionals participate, benchmark results will become increasingly more accurate, creating added value to all participants. On top of that, various market-segments can potentially merge data that will surprise the entire industry with insights that are not visible today.

For more information visit iMoba.com