Adding Confidence to Judgment Calls with SIWI
The modern fish farmer has to weigh many, often conflicting, factors when making operational decisions at a farm site. They're balancing sales needs, resource limitations, and complex animal husbandry issues with a constantly changing set of ocean conditions on each farm. Technology is transforming this challenge through an ever expanding IoT dataset (e.g., high resolution hydrographic sensors) and new tools like automated lice counting. However, the daily decisions that enable fish to grow well on a profitable and sustainable farm (e.g., feeding, treatments, infrastructure maintenance) still come down to human judgment. And the aim of truly innovative producers is to augment their team’s judgment with the best available tools.
Operational intelligence platforms are software tools that turn heaps of data into useful insights to bring more confidence to operator judgment. Scoot’s operational intelligence platform, SeaState, integrates saltwater production data with the surrounding ocean conditions to deliver data insights and forecasts that focus teams’ attention where it’s needed most. SeaState users range from site managers to veterinarians to operations executives, all of whom have different areas of responsibility and experience.
It is the Site Manager’s responsibility to make daily decisions and be aware of everything going on at their farm. SIWI, Scoot’s Integrated Welfare Index, provides insight that saves managers from having to access and interpret all of the raw data collected on the farm. The index weights the relative stress impact of environmental conditions, ongoing fish health, and operational disturbances. Managers and their teams use SIWI to direct focus to the most important stressors as they are unfolding. Moreover, SIWI provides a benchmark for comparison so that managers can assess the severity of a stressor relative to typical conditions for the site.
The average weekly changes in the SIWI Stress Total and individual stress indicators at a farm site. The SIWI Stress Total has gone up since last week. In this case, the Site Manager would direct their focus their efforts on Plankton, Salinity, and Appetite stressors.
From a leadership perspective, SIWI gives the executive team full visibility into operations without information overload. SIWI highlights systemic stressors and trends in saltwater production that can ultimately impact other business units. In other words, the raw data from all of a producer’s farm sites can be put to work to proactively optimize later stages of the value chain.
SIWI Stress Totals for the previous and current cohorts at a farm site. The 2021 cohort experienced a prolonged period of higher stress due to relatively low oxygen levels that was not experienced by the previous cohorts during the same days of their grow out cycle (starting around stocking day 300). This suggests an elevated risk of downgrades or other negative outcomes compared to past experience at this site.
A team that harnesses operational intelligence has moved beyond data collection and visualization; they are using insights from data to make fully informed, proactive decisions. Consider a producer experiencing more frequent plankton blooms and recently implemented a new plankton monitoring program: Operational intelligence can translate the monitoring data into a mitigation strategy. This could be the purchase of a new mitigation system or it could be a revised harvest and stocking schedule optimized for the shifting seasonality of blooms.
Importantly, with SIWI these decisions are not made in isolation, they can be made within the greater context of all the stressors across the sites. Producers can be confident that the judgment calls made across the organization are thorough, informed by real-time environmental and production data, and incorporating historical and emerging conditions and outcomes at their farm sites.
If you’re already running SeaState, you can find more details about the SIWI model and how it works inside the platform. If you’re not yet a customer, we’d love to connect with you to learn more about what influences your operational decision making today, and how we can support your work in the future. Reach out at info@scootscience.com.