Lely Web Advice
The Lely FMS Web Advice application is a brand new tool which has been designed to support you in the day-to-day management-related issues on your farm. It is sometimes good to ask yourself the question ‘how can I improve my management?’ You are searching for a solution, but instead of making an appointment with your advisor for next week you want to have the answer immediately. So you open an online search engine. Unfortunately the information provided on the internet is not farm-specific. In order to improve the results on your farm, you want to compare your performance with other similar farmers in the area and with the Lely standards.
The Web Advice application enables Lely to help you quickly, accurately and efficiently. While performing your daily routines within T4C, and sitting comfortably at your computer, you can quickly access YourGuide where you will find a link to the Web Advice. Simply click and request the advice you would like to receive, based on your farm-specific circumstances, and off you go. You can continue with your daily routines and the advice will be sent automatically to your personal email address.
Level of advice
The Web Advice application contains four different levels; Basic, Detailed, Personal and Web Discussion. Please note that at the moment of writing the various levels are not yet available in all languages. The differences between the various levels are obvious. A detailed Web Advice provides you with more and further in-depth information than the basic level Web Advice.
If you look into the various types of advice in finer detail you will notice that the Basic and Detailed Web Advice is currently based on three different reports. These reports are ‘AMS Visit Behavior and Failures’, ‘Reducing Fetch Cows’ and ‘Optimizing Robot Performance’. Obviously more different reports will follow in the (near) future to supply customized fact-based advice. The three different reports are discussed in more detail below.
AMS Visit Behavior and Failures
Good robotic milking results are based on good visiting behavior by the cows and a high number of successful milkings. Therefore this is an aspect that is always open for debate and improvements -even when the KPIs show good results. Would you like to know where your points of improvement can be found? If so, start by requesting this report. The advice on ‘AMS Visit Behavior and Failures’ provides an overview of the number of milk visits, refusals and failures on your farm and automatically compares the information from your farm with all other farms in your country. If the visiting behavior of your cows deviates, the advice will contain suggestions on how to improve this.
Optimizing Robot Performance
At the end of the day, all farm results are about making money. Consequently, increasing the volume of milk from your robot is the first step in achieving this. But how can you get more milk from each machine? Perhaps some advice on ‘Optimizing Robot Performance’ will provide you with the solutions you are seeking. The advice from ‘Optimizing Robot Performance’ focuses on how to get more milk out of your robot. The milk yield per box time of your robots is compared with the highest-ranked robot performance in your country and suggestions are provided on how to improve the robot performance on your farm.
Reducing Fetch Cows
Labor saving is recognized as a reason for most farmers to invest in automatic milking. However with automatic milking a new labor cost routine pops up, which is fetching cows that are not visiting the robot for some particular reason. This is a daily routine which is familiar to every single farmer around the world. The advice on ‘Reducing Fetch Cows’ takes a closer look at the refusals and free time on your robot, and tries to establish why you might have too many cows to fetch. Suggestions are also given about how to reduce the number of cows you have to fetch on your own farm.
How does it work?
After reading this article about Web Advice you might be wondering how Lely is able to provide all this farm-specific advice worldwide. The range of advice that we provide is based on our Lely Benchmark data. This advice compares your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with country averages and Lely recommended standards. Based on these factors the Web Advice application suggests areas where you can improve and thus increase the profitability and sustainability of your farm.
First results
Evaluation of the initial results indicates that farmers experience the Lely Web Advice system as a simple and efficient tool that provides an independent and eye-opening insight into their farm management policy. Some of the suggestions are maybe relatively simple and easy to implement, and farmers might think ‘why didn’t I come up with that myself?’; while other suggestions require more advice and support. In addition to the known and existing sources of information, Lely Web Advice is a quick and smart addition to your daily farm management. To find out more, check YourGuide in your T4C.
