Dr. Strauch: How to optimize your farm’s weekly production meeting

aviNews International had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Alexander Strauch about How to optimize your farm’s weekly production meeting Dr. Strauch is a DVM, and he has been working for the last 6 years as a commercial poultry veterinarian. Five of those years were into a commercial company, and since last year, Dr. Alexander is working as an independent consultant serving different types of poultry operations. During this interview, Dr. Strauch gave important tips and details about how to optimize the weekly production meeting since, in animal production as well as other areas, it is necessary to pay attention to all components, including people, and it is essential to put things in the right side to be successful. Therefore, Dr. Strauch explained that the purpose of the weekly production meeting is to force or make sure that everybody is on the same page and on top of their data. It means the right people are looking at the right numbers so that we never get behind on our metrics and we do not let things get too out of expectations. Regarding how and often a team should review data, Dr. Strauch stated that a team must review the data because poultry production is all about constant monitoring and surveillance. This is surveillance to the tune of a couple of key metrics that are looked at every day, no matter what is going on. Moreover, he emphasized that the meetings should be carried out at a minimum of once a week. For example, if there are three farms within an operation, there should be three separate production meetings. With that, the whole team can look at all the numbers at one time. Other discussed questions were:

• How many performance parameters should be monitored per meeting? And which ones do you consider the most important?
• Who should be at the meeting?
• Is there any format or “script” of the meeting you think can be useful? (See attached the script recommended by Dr. Strauch)
• Please explain root-cause-analysis & corrective actions.
• How would you promote the “why” within teams and increase the sense of ownership?
• Do you have any advice to improve meeting efficiency and the decision-making process?

To watch the full interview, click here