Operational Excellence

Incubation is not always easy – your hatchery manager has a lot on his/her mind. Every day, he/she has to match varying chick demand to egg supply, watch over the hatching process, manage the chick handling before shipment, check egg storage conditions, choose correct incubation programs, and much more. Every time, he/she works with eggs that come from a different flock, with different backgrounds and sizes. Still he/she needs to make sure he/she meets the production targets day after day.

Therefore, everyone in the hatchery, at every level, should get the basics right. Understanding his or her task, understanding how to operate the equipment and grasping the process. A hatchery manager should focus on analysing the data whilst being able to fully rely on his/her team for the basic operations. This is the way to improve the incubation results and to use your equipment to its full potential.

Your maintenance manager has a key role in the profitability of your hatchery. He/she makes sure the hatchery is up and running, while keeping the energy bill low. Any downtime in production is a nightmare. Broken parts, leakages, faulty sensors etc. are very often caused by poor maintenance. Good preventive maintenance saves you a lot of money and trouble. You will avoid the cost of downtime, reduce your spare part expenses as you will have fewer parts breaking and improve your results as it increases your machine lifetime.

Energy consumption is often an underestimated cost. If left unnoticed or not managed over many years, this may represent a large sum. You can limit your energy consumption by choosing adequate energy-efficient technology and creating awareness with every employee as energy can be wasted in many processes.

What is the cost of poor maintenance?
Example: Not replacing the door seals on the incubators in a timely manner. A non-hermetically sealed incubator can easily lead to a loss of 0.3% hatchability. If the problem remains unnoticed for 9 months, a hatchery producing 750,000 DOC/week could lose more than 100,000 birds.

The head of your cleaning team has the challenging task of making sure bio-security in your hatchery is guaranteed at all times. Even though the importance of good cleaning and disinfecting practices is known, people sometimes start to become negligent, forget certain tasks and deviate from the procedure. Keeping everyone focused and sharp can be a challenge, which is why the bio-security chain is only as strong as the weakest link!

It takes a disciplined team to make sure every corner in your hatchery is cleaned and disinfected correctly, every day. Having established and known cleaning procedures helps to avoid any risk. But also checking the accuracy of execution and monitoring all procedures in a critical way is crucial. Nothing should be overlooked, from the smallest filter to a complete fluff tunnel.