What are poultry farming performance indicators?
Poultry farming performance indicators are your preferred measurements for telling if your farm is on target for achieving expected output.
These are both qualitative and quantitative.
In other words,
they tell you if you are meeting:
- quality standards
- (i.e. if your product will be of an acceptable condition for market)
- volume estimates
- (i.e. if you have enough product scheduled for delivery to match the expected demand)
Why are poultry farming performance indicators important?
Poultry performance indicators are a kind of management dashboard for staying on track with business goals.
Without them, poultry farming is purely guesswork.
Each of them works in the same way dials and readings on a car dashboard keep a driver aware of vital car functions.
These indicators help you:
- steer clear of going off track
- regain lost ground
- make fine-tune touches before its too late
- plan alternative routes to success
- learn vital lessons for improving your farm
All in all, they give you a clear sight of the road ahead helping you reach your long term destination of ROI (return on investment).
Example poultry performance indicator
Best practice
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Poultry farming hasn’t changed from inception until now.
Why?
The chicken hasn’t changed.
Sure, cross-breeding has improved rates of production.
Technology is utilised to run operational processes faster and with more precision.
But the essentials haven’t moved one bit.
Nor will they.
Because a chicken, is a chicken, is a chicken.
So,
Why reinvent the wheel and dream up your own key performance indicators?
The same indicators for poultry production performance have been used over the generations,
And should be used by you in today’s scenario too. Find them out.
Further reading: My six top key performance indicators for a poultry business – LinkedIn Jeremy Watson (COO) Biyinzika Poultry International
Use consistent units
There’s nothing more confusing when browsing analytical reports for a poultry business than inconsistent units.
What you want to ensure is that you are comparing apples with apples in your analysis.
Inconsistency in units and measure leads to gross errors in projections.
Display them dashboard style
Dashboarding is a great way to capture all of your key poultry business data in a single snapshot.
Much like a car dashboard helps a drive perform better by presenting the key facts and figures continually…
…managerial dashboards help managers:
- make quick but accurate decisions
- always keep an eye on the most important facts within the business
- communicate justification clearly
Dashboards are a matter of personal preference.
There is no right or wrong way to produce a dashboard – it’s very much a custom fit.
But once you have developed the ideal performance dashboard for your poultry farm,
You’ll never be behind in knowing where your investment stands.
Further reading: Excel Dashboards – Templates, Tutorials, Downloads & Examples (Chandoo)
Automate as much as possible
Upkeep of dashboards can be quite an administrative overhead.
In other words,
You can end up spending more time making and updating business dashboards than actually running your business.
To save yourself the hassle ongoing, try setting up automated computer-based routines for:
- drawing in data
- compiling tables
- converting tabulated data into charts & graphs
- routinely updating
You will require some programmatical help with this.
But thanks to universally accessible software programs, like MS Excel or Google Sheets,
Automatically updating business dashboards can be relatively painless.
Further reading: Excel VBA Examples, Excel Macros & Free Downloads (Chandoo)
Alert yourself when something needs attention
Set up automated alerts to (…well…) alert you when performance indicators breach a certain degree of tolerance.]
For example,
Wouldn’t it be a help when your business software would alert you when your gross profit margin drops below your projected target?
This way you could immediately respond by adjusting your product price or renegotiating supply cost to preserve your profits.
Further reading: How to have your spreadsheet automatically send you an SMS alert when a cell value changes (Factivate)