The feed industry is under constant pressure of tight margins and raw material price volatility. To allow for more precise animal feeding, and thus more sustainable animal production, feed companies are constantly investing and developing new technologies. (Think about the improved knowledge about and use of enzymes, probiotics, gut acidifiers and industry by-products…) To get the most out of these new technologies and provide precise nutrition to your customers it is essential that your formulas are accurately calculated.

Precise nutrition requires precise monitoring of the raw material quality

Unfortunately, many feed organisations are still struggling with the basics of feed formulation: managing the nutrient specs of raw materials. Obviously, formulating with inaccurate or outdated nutrient values is like driving blind. Formulators should know about the quality of the raw materials in stock or this will inevitably result in:

• Feed not matching the nutrients specs: animals not producing as expected and unhappy customers
• Inefficient use of the raw materials: spoilage and loss of money

Luckily, today, affordable technology (i.e. NIR instruments) is available to measure the quality of each raw material intake. However, transforming this sample information into matrix values to be used in your formulation is still not common practice. To simplify this process for day-to-day users Adifo has developed an integration between our formulation and quality data software.

Update matrix – How does it work?

The data from NIR instruments (Click here for a list of NIR instruments we integrate with) and NIR service providers, like enzyme and premix suppliers is captured in the BESTMIX Quality Control database. Standard interfaces with all prominent instruments and service providers are available. Control charts are used to monitor the evolution of nutrient data, to compare origins and suppliers and to suggest the new values for formulation. The “Update matrix-dashboard” gives the formulator the ability to fine tune data, compare suggested new values with actual matrix values and to push the data into the raw material matrix. Derived nutrient matrix values are updated in the same update run.

Once updated, the formulator uses the formula checker to decide how to cope with the impacted formula’s. From this point all new formula’s will use the most recent nutrient values to guarantee precise formulation.

Both tight integrations, the capturing of data from the NIR instruments and the update of raw material in formulation, allow feed manufacturers to be in control and to get the most out of new developments and technology in the industry.

Update matrix – Within BESTMIX or with your formulation solution

The update matrix integration is available for BESTMIX Feed formulation and BESTMIX Quality Control. BESTMIX Quality Control can also provide the quality data to other formulation solutions.

If you want to learn more about this integration, be sure to check out the webinar or contact our specialists directly. If you would like to stay up to date with our existing and future integrations, please subscribe to our newsletter.