The Department of Agriculture and Food has put into operation a new wireless-enabled application that allows livestock inspectors to complete checklists and input data from their farm inspections using mobile phones.
The simple system designed and provided by Púca in partnership with Vodafone Ireland, enables inspectors to increase productivity, lower costs, and plan their inspections more efficiently. Current EU regulations dictate that governments inspect at least 10 per cent of all farms per year in order to validate EU payments under the Common Agricultural Policy system.
The Department has 140,000 farms on its books and each farmer can expect a visit every few years. ‘With only a three-month window to complete all sheep inspections, speed and flexibility are crucial,’ says Declan O’Riordan, systems analyst at the Department of Agriculture and Food.
Púca created a bespoke application that delivers drop-down menus on each of the inspector’s mobile phones. They can input all necessary data required for each herd within one minute after which the data is sent to Púca’s secure managed mobile platform where all records are amalgamated and delivered as text to the Department’s mainframe.
All up-to-date results are available each morning giving management the ability to use the information instantly and allocate inspectors accordingly. Reduced administration and travel costs also create cost savings for the Department. The inspectors use basic Nokia 6210 or 3410 WAP-enabled GSM and GPRS phones with Vodafone SIM cards to send reports to the department containing information such as the date of inspection, identification, and checked answers to a number of questions from the drop-down menu. While inspectors input their findings, administrative staff at the department process the data for payments to farmers. ‘Before they (the inspectors) would have to come into the office and input the data on a PC,’ he said. The Department had considered providing its 140 inspectors with PDAs, but it was felt that the advantages, along with the extra costs and training were not significant enough.’
‘We are always looking at ways to improve things and we’ll certainly look at 3G down the road,’ said O’Riordan. He added that the department has considered using camera phones as a potentially useful tool for reporting cases of suspected diseases like foot and
mouth, but that at the moment the resolution of the current generation of phones is not high enough just yet.
26/10/04
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