Anyone can and everyone does deliver key performance indicators (KPI's) to the dairy who is a stakeholder of the dairy either
as an employee of the farm or as a business that is supplying materials or working for the dairy. This is the dairies "management
team" and includes a diverse list of people such as the owner, on-farm manager, on-farm worker, veterinarian, nutritionist,
corporate veterinarian, corporate service personnel, processor field man, and ***, and ***, and ***.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the benchmarks commonly used to measure the performance of a segment of the dairy.
• Some can monitor performance such as growth or production during all stages of the life cycle
• Some will monitor management areas such as sanitation by udder hygiene scoring or management of negative and positive
energy balance with body condition scoring.
• Some monitor prevalence rates of health events such as SCC infection rates, fresh cow metabolic condition rates,
or conception rates etc.
Dairies that have put together a comprehensive team have an owner that manages the team so that all the individual members
have an opportunity to be successful and have developed a climate where the team can work together for the whole dairy. One
way to achieve this is to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to have the monitors needed for watching their area
of responsibility and still be aware of performance in areas that are not their responsibility (as if any areas of management
do not impact all areas).
Our role varies from dairy to dairy. But much of the information the team will need has its roots in the cow side records
established in the written protocols, so this presents a logical role for us to both gather and share information with other
team members or aid in getting information recorded. And probably most significantly, we have a system that monitors record
accuracy during our supervision of current cases.
Table 1
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There are two types of KPI's to consider because of the diversity of the team members and the diversity of information of
value to these different people; hard count numbers individuals or rates of conditions. Tracking hard count numbers of individual
animals that experienced a condition shows the work that has been done or that we are expecting in the key management areas
such as dry cows, the calving pen, the fresh pen, the mastitis pen, foot care and heifer raising. For example:
This type of report is far more valuable than the rate of some occurrence for those that work cow side because it presents
information in a manner that has true meaning for workers. It indicates how much time workers will need to accomplish their
work or the reverse, are the workers accomplishing the work that is expected?
