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The AAV has responsibilities to submit a daily voyage report as per ASEL and the EC Animals Order 2004. The shipboard app is intended to allow collection of:
observations per day and deck on climate measures; observations at any location on animal health events any observation related to an
individual animal, pen of animals or on any relevant matter such as pen or deck conditions;
records of any treatments applied to individual animals or to pens or animals; records of any mortalities including post-mortem findings, if a post-mortem is completed;
general deck level observations on measures such as faeces, respiratory patterns, heat stress, feed and water consumption and other information;
observations about position latlong, sea and general climate conditions. The hand-held device can be synchronised with the laptop server application at any time.
The application will be able to automatically generate pre-defined reports such as the daily voyage report including where required generation or aggregated or other summary
calculations cumulative and daily counts of mortalities by deck and expressed by class, breed and species. Ad hoc queries and data exports for analysis using spreadsheet or
statistical packages will also be possible through the laptop server application.
At a destination port, observations can be collected on time and date for start and end of unloading, counts of animals unloaded and any events illness, injury, death or other
observations that may occur during unloading.
The server application can be used to generate an end of voyage report using a pre-defined format.
Finally, when internet connectivity is available the application can synchronise with a web server to upload all records into a secure archive. This will allow additional and more
detailed analyses as required and will allow operators and relevant industry bodies with appropriate authorities to use the data either for commercial business management
purposes or for whole of industry aggregate analyses and reporting.
10.6 Additional functionality
The shipboard application described in this chapter was purposefully constrained in scope to the voyage loading
– at sea – unloading component of livestock export and to data collection requirements based on meeting daily voyage and end of voyage requirements.
During consultation with industry stakeholders in the design and discussion of prototypes, there was interest in extending the application to provide records of feed inventory and
similarly for medications. The application could be extended to provide both of these services.
A brief description is provided for management of inventory of veterinary equipment and medications.
The application could be populated with reference lists of commonly used equipment, consumables and medications. When inventory is loaded onto the ship the application could
be used to record what products are loaded and how much how many units.
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During the voyage, administration of any treatment to an individual animal or a pen of animals could be recorded product, volume or number of units, any consumables such as
syringe, needle, bandage, etc.
At the end of the voyage there could be a reconciliation of equipment and product inventory and the information used for assessment of voyage performance and to inform ordering
practices for future voyages.
It is anticipated that there will be future development of whole-of-chain performance monitoring systems to manage QA, regulatory compliance reporting and for efficient general
business management. Many of the issues and options for systems to manage performance data across the supply chain are discussed in a recent report by Perkins and Madin
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and in a related report on QA programs by Peter Schuster.
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There are also ongoing activities aimed at reviewing welfare outcomes in exported livestock and developing additional
measures that may be recorded and reported for performance monitoring in an industry QA program.
The shipboard application would need to be modified to ensure that it can be used to collect whatever raw data measures may be required to meet QA and other regulatory reporting
requirements.
A shipboard application is a discrete system that can be developed as a stand-alone application because while the ship is at sea and particularly when an AAV is moving around
the decks, there is likely to be no functional internet connectivity and the system has to function as a hand-held data capture device. This is an important point because it means
that a decision to progress with developing a functional shipboard application is not dependent on any decision to develop a larger, whole-of-chain system of which the
shipboard app might be one component.
The prototypes described in this report have been developed with three levels of functionality:
Web-based application that can receive and store data and provide full functionality from anywhere with an internet connection;
Server application installed on a laptop a stand-alone installation of the main web application that is capable of functioning as a server on a laptop without any internet
connection that allows full functionality to be maintained during a voyage; and A hand-held application running on a mobile device Android or iOS that can provide
data entry and querying capability anywhere on the ship and that can be synchronised with a server application that may be running on a laptop or on a web-server.
If a larger-scoped, whole-of-chain information management system were developed for collecting and managing performance data from across the supply chain, then the shipboard
app just needs to be able to communicate and share data with the larger system in order to achieve effective whole-of-chain coverage.
At the start of a voyage the shipboard app may need to be able to receive data from a whole-of-chain system, such as shipboard lists of animals and other key information. At the
78
Perkins and Madin 2013
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Schuster 2013
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end of the voyage the shipboard app needs to be able to export key data and information collected during the voyage into a whole-of-chain system.
10.7 Learnings from prototype development and feedback
