Strategies for Reducing Variation

     I had an opportunity to spend some time at VION, one of the largest food companies in the EU and one of the largest slaughterhouses for pigs due to recent expansions by merger and acquisiton.  They provide a website for their producers which gives a tremendous amount of very valuable information regarding their performance.  From the website the producer can download their individual animal kill stats as well as benchmark against the plant average and top performing farms.  In addition, they are provided information about lung health for instance and can also benchmark that against the plant.

Reduction in variation of growing pigs can have significant impacts on both cost of production and on return from the packer. This double impact on both cost and return makes this an especially lucrative subject for both study and the development of strategy leading to standard operating procedure (SOP) creation or amendments. Simply reducing variation is not the goal however since there is no guarantee that this will produce either cost reduction or income increase.