Zoetis is a global animal health company and the world’s largest producer of medicine and vaccinations for pets and livestock. A subsidiary of Pfizer, Zoetis operates in 70 countries worldwide and has revenues in excess of 5 billion USD.

As part of its efforts to bring innovation to the animal health industry, Zoetis has created a specialized quality assurance program for cattle/beef farms, which aims to provide consumers with only the highest quality beef, by guaranteeing meat quality from the ‘feedyard to the fork’. As part of this program, participating cattle farms follow a set of standard procedures and practices related to farm management (such as cattle housing, feed quality, health monitoring, disease management and vaccinations, etc.) specified and audited by Zoetis themselves, in order to be certified under the program.

Since all the processes stipulated under the program were paper based, farm owners and managers often faced difficulty in recording and tracking the various activities, SOPs and results related to the program. And since Zoetis’ program managers and auditors needed to verify these documents to ensure the farm’s certification, proper recording and tracking of these activities was absolutely vital.

To overcome these challenges, Zoetis wanted to develop a mobile solution that would digitize the entire workflow, enabling farm owners, feedlot managers and workers to track and record these activities directly on their smartphones; and Zoetis’ auditors to review and monitor the SOPs implementation and their results in real time, from a single, unified platform. Impressed with Folio3’s credentials in the enterprise mobility and digital transformation space, Zoetis chose to partner with Folio3 to help them develop this solution.

Working in collaboration with Zoetis, Folio3 designed and developed a one of kind, multi-platform mobile solution for the program, that includes a cross platform app (for iOS, Android and desktops) for feedlot managers and workers, and a backend web app for farm owners and Zoetis’ auditors.

The app enables feed yard workers to conveniently fill out the various forms and checklists associated with each SOP and process directly from their mobile devices, while the back end web app provides farm owners and the Zoetis’ program managers with a consolidated view of program compliance across all feedyards and farms.

Key features of solution include:

• Enabling farm workers to view their daily tasks & feedyard assignments on their mobile devices.
• Enabling farm workers to record and submit feedyard activities and observations directly from the field on their mobile device.
• Allowing farm owners and managers to view feedyard performance statistics in real time.
• Allowing farm owners and managers to view feedyard performance statistics in real time.
• Enabling farm owners / managers to view and edit feedyard activities.
• Enabling farm owners to view and manage multiple feedyards.
• Allowing program managers to view & edit program manuals & SOPs.

Thanks to Folio3’s efforts, Zoetis was able to completely eliminate paper based work from the program, which greatly enhanced the program’s overall efficiency. The ability to monitor program compliance and day to day feedyard conditions and activities in real time also helped improve the program’s effectiveness at participating farms since farm managers could take immediate corrective action based on real time monitoring; and Zoetis’ program managers and auditors could now track and measure program compliance much more easily from the application, without needing to go through mounds of paper based forms.

The solution also received accolades at the 2015 International Mobile Developers Conference due to its fluid and highly responsive UI, despite being built on the Sencha framework. The project is currently on-going, with the Folio3 team providing maintenance and support for the Progressive Beef application.

The Folio3 team did an amazing job. They really look out for the customer and try and do the best for them. Very impressed with the final product they delivered. I really enjoyed working with their team and would highly recommend them.

Sarah Schumacher – Progressive Beef Program Manager, Zoetis