C2-Lancaster Farming, Saturday, November 12, 1994 P' mil Iti 'o Penn State Poultry Pointers MANAGEMENT SCIENCE FOR POULTRY DECISIONS Dr. William B. Roush Associate Professor Poultry Science Traditionally, poultry manage ment has dealt primarily with the husbandry aspects of raising poul try. Optimal decision making approaches, another aspect of management, have been made more available to poultry mana gers through the development of computers and software. The discipline associated with optimal decision making is man agement science. Why haven’t we heard of management science applications to poultry decisions? Twenty to thirty years ago, the amount of investment in the poul try industry was generally not very large. For example, a one percent improvement in a $lO,OOO busi ness would yield only about $lOO. Now companies involved in the poultry industry have sales in the millions and billions of dollars. 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Cuatom Work (610) 869-8834 •* Roast-Cool Unit Available can result in savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Management science is also known as operations research and systems analysis. Management science is commonly used by For tune 500 companies to make tacti cal and strategic business decisions. Specifically, management sci ence is concerned with providing decision makers a scientific approach to the analysis of prob lems and identification of solu tions to those problems. Poultry Schnupp'a Grain Roasting. Inc, RD 6 Lebanon, PA 1-800-452-4004 717-865-6011 management problems are gener ally very complex, involving a number of alternatives and a num ber of uncertainties. Particularly unique to animal management is the variability associated with bio logical responses which must be considered in the decision-making process. The management scientist approaches complexity and varia bility by structuring the problems with quantitative models. The modelling of the variables is fun damental to management science. This represents the question to be asked and is crucial to obtaining an effective answer. This may seem self-evident, but defining the question is sometimes the most elusive part of the decision making process. From the model, one or more solutions are gener ated which become candidates for the solution of the original prob lem. How effective these solutions are depends on the ability of the model to capture the important fea tures of the problem. Ultimately the decision maker makes the final decision judgment based on his or Buy Now and Save with our “Winter Work” Prices. Plus We’ll Pay You $5OO in 1994 IF YOU PREPARE A LEVEL BUILDING SITE Buildings now! Simply prepare a level building site by December 31,1994... for construction in 1995... and Morton Buildings will pay you $500! What’s more, you’ll avoid anticipated 1995 price increases. And to folly appreciate what that could mean, just take a look at what lumber prices have done the last two years! Take advantage of low winter prices and order now! CONTACT: 717/624-3331 3368 York Rd. P.O. Box 126, Gettysburg, pa 17325 Phllllpsburg, NJ 08865 PLANNING TO BUILD ? by December 31,1994! her ability to manage risk and uncertainty. There are many decision tools for management science. The deci- sion tool familiar to most poultry ' managers is linear programming for least-cost feed formulation. There are many other tools avail able in the Management Science “toolbox” which may have appli cation to poultry optimization problems. These tools include decision analysis, scheduling techniques, transportation algorithms, waiting line analysis, inventory control. and dynamic programming, to name a few. Some applications of decision tools to poultry problems made by researchers at Penn State 908/454-7900 University have been mentioned in previous columns. These success ful applications include decision analysis for caged laying hens (June 5,1993) and stochastic non linear programming for feed for mulation (November 14,1992 and November 20, 1993). Opportunities for making opti mal decisions in poultry manage ment abound in such areas as pro cessing facilities, control of animal environments, transportation of feed and products, nutritional database, quality control in feed mills, etc. Management science is a discip line that offers the poultry manager an approach to solving these com plex problems. /• ' 800-447-7436 Mk MORTON P. O. Box 399, Morton, IL 61550 © 1994 Morton Buildings, Inc
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