Patni helped its client implement a high-tech "Animal Traceability" System, to help it meet new European
and US government regulations and expand its leadership in the South American market.
The Client
A leading supplier of livestock information services and products in the UK.
The Challenge
The outbreak of mad cow, and foot and mouth diseases has resulted in
significant losses for the US and Europe livestock industry. To develop
control mechanisms for such epidemics, Government agencies have
enforced regulations; resulting in super markets mandating a code of
practice for all suppliers. This requires unique animal identification for
providing total traceability and accountability throughout the food chain.
The client thus needed to implement a reliable system to track its meat
shipments, within a short 8-month window.
The Solution
Patni leveraged its RFID expertise, SmartVISION solution suite, and project
management skills, and quickly ramped up a team to develop and
implement an integrated "Animal Traceability" System.
The key requirements of the solution included:
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Complete traceability of cattle from the bone-in carcass back to birth; achieved by
capturing the parentage of the animal and its progeny. |
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Tracing of all holdings on which the cattle has resided, and thus the breeding regime
followed in each holding. |
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Capture of records of the feed used by the grower; documenting of cattle feeding regimes
and constituents and making them readily available for inspection; ensuring a
documentation audit trail. |
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Providing a database at the national level, for use by Governmental agencies for controlling
movement, butchering, audits, grading the product, etc. |
How the "Farm to Plate" traceability is achieved
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All animals are tagged with unique electronic-ids, using an RFID tag |
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A handheld device containing a RFID reader/writer (called Romeo) is used to capture the
animal data like sex, date-of-birth, breed-species, parent details. Similarly all data like
animal's movement history, health records, treatment product details are also recorded |
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At regular intervals, Romeo is docked on another desktop device namely Juliet for data
synchronization. All new/modified data from Romeo is transferred to Juliet and Juliet will
synchronize its data with a central server.
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When animals move from one farm to another, or farm to abattoir, data like the date of
movement, vehicle-info carrying this animal batch, etc., is recorded. |
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The abattoir also accesses the central server using web applications. At the abattoir,
additional animal data like temperature, weight, fat are captured just before slaughtering
the animal. All these data are transferred to the central database along with a KILL event.
The electronic-ids of these slaughtered animals are not reused thus ensuring the unique
identification of animals. Once the meat is packed the barcode identification on the
package will have mapping to the unique electronic identification of that animal. Thus the
total backward traceability of the meat can be achieved. |
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The Technology
All the applications required for "Animal Traceability" have been developed and
implemented by Patni. These include:
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Embedded applications for Romeo-Juliet devices, which include features like Voice
recognition processing, Printer interface, Interface with external devices and Online
up-gradation of Romeo application. |
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Central server application for synchronizing the global data from multiple farms. |
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Several web applications for viewing, modifying central server database data. |
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Web applications for abattoir interface. |
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Developing and maintaining SDKs. |
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The hardware RFID tags and handheld readers were supplied by a hardware vendor. |
The Benefits
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Client deployed the "Animal Traceability" system successfully in
the UK, France, Australia, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile. |
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Ability to trace meat products from "Plate" right to the animal
with access to all relevant information including its feeding data,
parentage and other vital information helped to provide customers
with an assurance of getting disease-free products. |
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Enabled timing of feeds, vaccinations, etc and creating an audit
trail for the same. |
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Additional benefits from ability to analyse aggregated data to
understand trends and responses to certain actions. |
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