Egg Farmers of Canada (EFC) has purchased and implemented routing and scheduling software from Paragon Software Systems. EFC is a not-for-profit organization that forecasts demand for eggs, promotes eggs and develops national standards for egg farming in Canada.
The organization will use Paragon’s software to improve the efficiency of its team of home-based field inspectors who audit and deliver biosecurity and animal welfare programs across 1,100 Canadian egg farms.
According to Paragon, the software will allow EFC to centralize weekly schedules and optimize routes, the organization is aiming to get a clear view of the calls its inspectors need to make each year, identify spare resource capacity and reduce journey and travel time.
“Previously the inspectors would do their own planning,” said Michel Smith, field operations manager at EFC. “With Paragon we are able to centralize this function giving a detailed view of the farms, the workload and resource capacity. With our inspection team covering the whole of Canada, we need to optimize the resource, which is why we’ve opted for Paragon. I know that we are going to see savings from a journey perspective because the software will optimize the routes and it will also help us gain efficiencies. However, if I need to add more visits because of additional work it will allow me to see our existing capacity and resource availability for growing the business. Before we brought in Paragon, it would have been virtually impossible to do that.”
EFC inspectors travel an average of 370 mi. a week, with some members of the team covering up to 46,600 mi. a year, the company said.
