Most of the daily activities conducted on a dairy farm need to happen in a specific way every time.
There is a saying that there is “a right way, a wrong way and a dad’s way” to accomplish a task. We have learned that when it comes to milking and feeding cows, there are only right and wrong ways of doing it.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are an invaluable tool to document how an activity should be completed and convey that information to the people doing the job. SOPs aren’t just tools to describe how to get a job done your way. They are tools that provide details on how to accomplish a task the right way.
I am sure that you put in a lot of thought when writing your initial plans. You probably checked the label on your pre-milking teat dips so you could record how long you should wait before wiping it off. You consulted your feed mixer owner’s manual to determine the proper ingredient mixing order and mixing time to produce a uniform ratio. You may have performed a few checks to see that the procedures were working properly by monitoring your somatic cell count or pulling a few samples from the mixer for analysis. The question is, are you still doing these checks and are there others that you should have been doing as well?
For most of us, we view evaluation as a something that happens at the end of the process to determine that we have achieved the desired outcome, or to just see what the outcome was. In fact, evaluating a plan is the first thing we should be thinking about when initially writing a plan or revising it at a later date. We need to know that the plan is working.
Thorough evaluation monitors not only the outcomes but also the process you use to get there. To properly evaluate a plan, you need to have the correct people involved in writing the plan. You need short-term evaluation points to know you are heading in the right direction, and you need those long-term evaluation points to determine if you have achieved your primary goal.
Before you ever put pen to paper, you need to assemble a team that can help you write the best plan for your operation. Each plan may have its own team. If you are writing a feed mixing plan, you may choose to include your nutritionist, your equipment supplier, your supplement supplier(s) and the people who are doing the feeding.
If you are creating a plan for the milking procedures, you may include the milking equipment technician, your parlor chemical supplier, the milk tester, your buyer and those members of your team who perform the daily milkings.
The goal is to include the people to help you write a plan the meets all of your goals. They can also be critical in helping with the other steps of the process to know what needs to be evaluated and how to assess it.
All the individual SOPs become steps that help you achieve the overall goals for your operation. While they are written independently, they become united under your mission and vision. You need to have an evaluation plan for the individual SOPs (short-term goals) as well as your mission and vision (long-term goals). As you are writing the plan, you need to identify your evaluation points about your goals/desired outcomes. This is the who, what, when, where and why: who will be doing your checks, what methods will you be using to evaluate the plan outcomes, where will the evaluation occur, how often will this happen and why did you choose this method?
Your main goal may be to maximize your milk check premiums by hitting all of the quality benchmarks. To accomplish this, you want to always achieve a somatic cell count of 200,000 or less. Somatic Cell Count may end up as an evaluation point for your parlor SOP as well has your bedding management and herd health SOPs. How often are you going to evaluate these criteria against each of the plans where it is required?
The final level of evaluation is of the plan itself. You should have scheduled reviews of your plans. Does the plan still fill its role for the operation? Have the quality indicators changes since the last review? Are there new technologies that can assist with your monitoring process? The successful implementation of your plan isn’t complete until you share it with the operations team. It is the team that puts the plan into action.
In conclusion, evaluation procedures are as important as the actual steps listed within a plan. It isn’t the end of the process, but the beginning. When evaluation becomes part of your routine, it also helps with the inevitable procedural drift that occurs over time. Management taking ownership of all levels of evaluation helps employees understand why there is a right way to complete a task and how that helps the operation achieve its goals.
