] COMMERCIAL PROFILE ]
CONNECTING THE FOOD ISLAND
Ireland’s food and agribusiness sector has been quick to utilise the latest in
communications technology to innovate, improve customer service and gain
competitive advantage on both the home and international markets.
“The Irish food and agri sector has been one of the major
success stories of the past few years”, says Vodafone
Ireland enterprise director Anne Sheehan. “A key factor
in this success has been the commitment to innovation
and a willingness to embrace the latest technologies on
the part of individual firms in the sector. We have
experienced this at first hand where we have seen
customers in this area being amongst the earliest
adopters of new products and services such as 4G.”
One such company is Carlow based Richard Keenan
& Company. The company’s distinctive green Keenan
Mixer Wagons have become a familiar sight on farms
across the globe where they assist farmers deliver the
optimal feed mix to their livestock and in turn help
achieve the most efficient conversion of feed into milk
or meat.
The firm’s latest innovation is inTouch, a food production
platform which has the potential to link the entire supply
chain from farm to processor to retailer. It combines
engineering, nutrition and IT technologies to deliver a
repeatable result which improves sustainability and
profitability for farmers and processors.
The platform comprises the inTouch Connect unit, a
precision feeding system fitted to the mixer wagon
which guides the operator through the mixing process
to ensure that the animals get the correctly balanced
diet on a repeatable basis. This unit is connected
directly to the Cloud using Vodafone’s machine to
machine technology allowing for a real-time feed of
information to the company’s inTouch support centre.
Keenan Mixer Wagons have become a familiar sight on farms across the globe
“Vodafone machine to machine and cloud technology
has been our biggest and most beneficial leap as the
flow of information has become much more reliable
and comprehensive”, says inTouch Director, Conan
Condon. “We are now able to review each farmer’s
feeding regimes remotely and send information to each
wagon remotely. Farmers no longer have to remember
to have a memory stick in their pocket and then upload
the information onto their computers at night. M2M and
cloud technology has enabled us to develop the largest
database of farm data of this type in the world which
is being used by our team of scientists and nutritionists
for the betterment of the industry.”
One of the earliest adopters of 4G technology in Ireland
is Dawn Meats, a €1 billion business that sells into
countries across the globe. Dawn Meats is an
export-led business with production sites in Ireland,
the UK and France and sales offices in eight countries
across Europe.
Anne Sheehan Enterprise Director Vodafone Ireland
“The 4G capabilities now offered by Vodafone have
created an agile workforce, capable of working no matter
where they are”, says Stephen Farrell, network and
infrastructure manager with the company. “Vodafone’s
combination of mobile, fixed, cloud and hosting
solutions has enabled bus