Pig grading information system (PiGIS)

Part of: Pigs

Area of Expertise:
Services:

The Pig Grading Information System (PiGIS) enables producers and processors to assess and benchmark pig carcase quality and identify areas for improvement.

Key features

One of the key features of PiGIS is that kill weight, grade and condemnation data are directly uploaded from a pig processing plant to a central benchmarking database. This information can be accessed in "real time" by registered producers from their home computer via the internet. PiGIS has been developed by a specialist AFBI team and incorporates a back-end SQL Server database and Microsoft .NET web technology.


Two versions of PiGIS exist allowing:

Key Features of PiGIS

  • Automatic upload of data from processing plants to online database
  • Real-time analysis of individual producer data
  • Ranks producers in term of quality
  • Comparisons of performance over time
  • Comparison against "rest or best" producers
  • Statistical analysis highlights areas for improvement
  • Easy to use and flexible with self-explanatory analysis and reports

The experience gained in developing PiGIS shows that the principles and techniques involved could be extended both to other pig industries and to other species particularly sheep and beef cattle where work is already underway.