The Pig Grading Information System (PiGIS) enables producers and processors to assess
and benchmark pig carcase quality and identify areas for improvement.
One of the key features of PiGIS is that kill weight, grade and condemnation data
are directly uploaded from a pig processing plant to a central benchmarking
database. This information can be accessed in "real time" by registered producers from their
home computer via the internet. PiGIS has been developed by a specialist
AFBI team and incorporates a back-end SQL Server database and Microsoft .NET web technology.
Two
versions of PiGIS exist allowing:
Key
Features of PiGIS
- Automatic upload of data from processing plants
to online database
- Real-time analysis of individual producer data
- Ranks
producers in term of quality
- Comparisons of performance over time
- Comparison
against "rest or best" producers
- Statistical analysis highlights areas
for improvement
- Easy to use and flexible with self-explanatory analysis and reports
The
experience gained in developing PiGIS
shows that the principles and techniques involved could be extended both to other pig industries and
to other species particularly sheep and beef cattle where preliminary work has already started.
