Meaty Microsoft award for Tauranga innovator

By PETER GRIFFFIN

A Tauranga company has picked up Microsoft's inaugural innovation award for designing a user interface that will be used to keep things running smoothly at one of the biggest meat processing plants in the Southern Hemisphere.

Software developer Digital Business Intelligence International walked away with the award, which came with the grand prize of a Ducati motorcycle or $15,000 in cash, after designing a knowledge management tool for meat processor Richmond's Takapau plant.

The software, called KM Perform, uses Microsoft's "Digital Dashboard" tool to tap backend databases for statistics key to the meat processing process.

Everything from the number of carcasses that slaughterboard workers have processed through to the temperatures of the plant's massive freezers is now delivered to plant managers via a web browser in real time.

The plant manager at Takapau, Stuart Taylor, said the meatworks processed around 11,500 carcasses a day and had numerous contamination, temperature and performance indicators to keep tabs on.

"This has taken us from an organisation that traditionally relied on week-old paper reports to tell us how we were doing to one that now has up-to-the-minute key performance indicators (KPIs) tracking delivered to our PCs in real time," he said.

The digital dashboard concept allows users access to the customised views of the information they need on a daily basis. The feeds can range from simple components, like a web-based stock ticker, to data extracted from a data warehouse, taking the form of tables and graphs.

News-feeds, e-mail windows and scheduling programmes can also be added to the interface.

Reusable components or "Web Parts" form the heart of the Digital Dashboard. They can take the form of anything from e-mail and calendar functionality to training information or XML script.

The Web Parts can be stored almost anywhere - from inside Windows 2000's file system to inside a SQL Server table.

The Digital Dashboard concept is being pushed strongly by Microsoft as the company tries to drum up enthusiasm for its .NET strategy.

Microsoft has made Digital Dashboard development kits widely available to developers, but the company has also released its own tailor-made dashboards for certain industries.

This year the company unveiled the Physician Digital Dashboard, which allows doctors, nurses and clinicians to access personal, team, hospital, patient and external information and enables single-click access to analytical and collaborative tools.

Microsoft says the aim is to cut through the mass of paperwork that "knowledge workers" are faced with every day and deliver just the information they require.

Richmond is planning to extend its Digital Dashboard system across its five production departments as well as to other plants.

Company chiefs will also be able to tap into the information via a web browser from head office, keeping close tabs on how all the plants are performing at any time.

And Ian Carter, director of Digital Business Intelligence International, said the user-friendly interfacing that Digital Dashboard provides can also be adapted to mobile phones and Personal digital assistants (PDAs).

His firm is working on similar dashboard products for customers in the banking and retail sectors.

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Digital Dashboard

Richmond