Management Support System Essay

Management support systems have been playing a major role on increasing the productivity of dairy farms over the past few decades. There are many management support systems applied for various segments within the dairy industry to improve continuous decision making and problem solving abilities. This essay covers the analyzation of five different management support systems including evaluation of various theories and models used by each system.

1. Diet Check – A Feeding management support system

System

‘Diet Check’ is a widely used feeding Management support system (MSS) in dairy industry to help farmers allocate pasture more effectively, and to provide a balanced supplement to their cows. ‘Diet Check’ estimates whether cows are consuming required level of nutrition for a given level of milk production by using its own estimate method to identify the pasture intake and nutrient intake from pasture. As

“Feed costs accounted for the largest share of milk production cost at 65 to 75 percent at operating cost and 33 to 50 percent of total economic cost” (McBride, 2009, p.39). Effective management and optimization of the feeding process is critical as that effects not only profitability but also has an impact on improved pasture utilization and effective use of supplements. Therefore, beyond established farm feeding methods, there is a need for decision support tools to support farmers to take strategic feeding decisions.

With ‘Diet Check’ system farmers can proactively take actions to increase the nutrient percentage of supplements to full fill the energy requirements of cows. This is a very helpful decision making system to improve the productivity of the farms especially in flooded irrigated regions which have low nutrient percentage in pasture.

Model &