A health & performance monitoring app for broiler producers

Digital Business Strategy
Digital Product Design
Platform Architecture
Software Engineering

Which came first, the chicken or the dataset? We don’t know, but all we know is that they’re allies! In The Pocket and Huvepharma developed Aviapp, a health & performance monitoring app for broiler producers.

Breeding animals is a hard job - especially when those animals attract various diseases. That’s why veterinarians regularly do health checks of flocks. For decades the results of these sessions were noted on paper. More often than not, this data was later transferred to individual Excel-files per posting session and shared ad hoc with client and supplier.

Huvepharma, a fast-growing global pharmaceutical company with a focus on developing, manufacturing and marketing of human and animal health products, wanted to set up a centralised system where data of these sessions is put in and available for analysis and combined with performance data. This way, structural improvements of the health status, welfare and performance of the birds proper treatment recommendations can be made based on data which clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of certain treatments over time. Up until then, these decisions were based mostly on the vet's gut feeling and scattered data which didn't always allow for clear interpretation.

Aviapp                                                                                        

That’s where In The Pocket comes in. Together with Huvepharma we created Aviapp, an avian health and performance monitoring tool that runs on both web and tablet. Now veterinarians and farmers or their technical staff can:

Manage their company

  • Give access to users such as veterinarians, production managers and data analysts and grant them the appropriate permissions
  • Add and manage complexes and farms within the complex
  • Flocks and flock properties

Manage their flocks: add health and performance data

  • Results from posting sessions
  • Treatments (feed additives / vaccines / antibiotics)
  • Ascendance (e.g. hatchery, parent flock)
  • Flock performance (feed/water intake, mortality, weight gain a.o.)

And much more

  • Review data from posting sessions in quick charts
  • Compare and review data more elaborately in custom graphs
  • Download raw data or images to include in their reports

Aviapp provides farmers with clear insights based on their own data on how to improve the health and therefore the performance of their animals.
Stefaan Bekaert, Global Product Manager Huvepharma

Charts and graphs

But wait, there’s more. In Aviapp quick charts offer an instant, quick overview of the data which allows fast interpretation - meaning users can adjust treatment accordingly on the day of the posting session itself. The faster they can act on report results, the faster they can fine-tune the performance of their farms/flocks, which puts them at a significant economical advantage.

Custom graphs allows users to evaluate the performance of certain treatments over time and compare them with data from last year; or benchmark it to draw even more elaborate conclusions regarding region, season, type of bird, type of treatment and the like. This way, users will know which products are most effective in which situation so they can order these in time.

Our approach

Here’s where things get slightly technical. Our software engineers started with a web application (Aviapp) written in EmberJS and a NodeJS API connected with a MongoDB Database. We chose NodeJS because of the simplicity, development & deployment speed and performance. MongoDB on the other hand allows us to easily store complex scoring reports & health data which otherwise would be a pain to store & query in a relational database. Next to the user application, we developed an administrator panel which supports multi-tenancy and management of all the users & clients within the system. Afterwards we developed an application wrapper written in Xamarin to support a native feel.

We also developed scheduled tasks to import Excel-files full of commercial data to support commercial demos. We’re currently in the process of developing a new JSON API behind an API management layer (Apigee) to allow third parties to connect their systems with Aviapp.

The project is hosted fully in the cloud. We finished up on API management, allowing clients to integrate other technical tools with Aviapp so they have all their data in one place. The current working issues are a faster and more reliable data entry and extra features for quick charts and custom graphs to allow even deeper analysis of data.

Our approach

No items found.

Fulfil your
ambitions

We'd love to hear about your next challenges.
Let's take the first step towards achieving your business goals. No strings attached.