Member Services Matters

Scott Wright, Member Services Manager

The Angus Australia Member Services staff are responsible for enabling Members to conduct all transactions with Angus Australia in a manner that is as streamlined and as efficient as possible.

Positive IT

Sometimes the smallest changes give you a result out of proportion to the energy that you invest in that change? Angus Australia’s IT team has spent years developing our Angus.TECH software modules and yet…

“Sometimes a small change is much more significant than a great change.”

At the start of 2021 we implemented a relatively unnoticed module which was the Angus.TECH job system. We’ve now run that successfully for five months across most of the Member Services area. In effect what the jobs system allows us to do is log every job that is submitted to the regos email, allocate a staff member and track turnaround times. Going back, members were concerned that jobs could be lost. I’m very pleased to be able to report that every job now submitted by a member to the Member Services team is now tracked and assigned through Angus.TECH. The software allows our staff to be able to view the complete job history of a particular member easily and without fuss. Also, it means that when members make an inquiry to any of the team that those jobs can be easily reviewed. For the current quarter, the job turnaround time for all Member Services Jobs is 0.48 days. Member Services have a service standard that requires all jobs to be completed within 3 business days. It’s very pleasing that our team has been able to achieve a much higher standard. It has been very helpful to myself, Peter Parnell and makes accountability and reporting to the Board of Directors transparent and very easy. Our thanks go to our IT department who quietly go about software development and often without praise or fanfare. This has been one of the most helpful modules developed in assisting the Member Services team deliver improved services.

Spring Inventory

Just a reminder to our members that Spring Inventory Fates are due 16th July and the billing will occur on the 26th July 2021. It is highly important to have spring fates completed by that date to ensure that members are not incorrectly charged.

Calving Books

This year no Calving Books were sent to members due to Inventory Forms being sent by email. If members require Calving Books, please email regos@angusaustralia.com.au including your Herd ID and number of Calving Books that you require and one of our Member Services Officers will post them out straight away.

Recording Embryo Transfer Calves – Information for members

With higher levels of ET calves being registered with Angus Australia members should be aware of a regulation that may cause issue in the registration of calves that fail parent verification. Often members will downgrade a HBR or APR dam to Recipient status to be used as a surrogate dam. Surrogate dams are often backed up to a natural joining in case the embryo transfer fails. Periodically an Embryo Transfer calf will fail DNA Parent Verification (PV) and the member will seek to change the parents of the calf to that of the recipient dam and naturally joined bull. The issue arises when the embryo transfer fails, and the recipient dam calves to a natural pregnancy. The following regulation is then applied: 6.40 The dam of an animal recorded in the HBR, APR, ACR or MBR can only be amended if it is accompanied by a full DNA parent verification (i.e. both sire and dam). In theory this is a straightforward process however often the recipient dam will not have a DNA profile meaning that the calf parentage cannot be changed until the recipient dam has been DNA tested. In practice this can be inconvenient and incurs additional costs. There are several solutions for members in this position: 1. Ensure that recipient dams have a DNA profile; 2. In the case that a recipient dam does not have a DNA profile be prepared to DNA test the dam to Parent Verify the calve to the natural parents; or 3. Record the calf without a Dam (ie record the calf with a sire only). The calf will then be recorded as a pending animal. Then conduct parent verification to the donor dam and sire(s) after recording the calf – in this case if the calf qualifies to the donor dam and sire the parentage can easily be amended. If it does not qualify to the donor, the calf is able to be recorded with the recipient dam and correct sire. The third method of recording calves to the natural joining and later conducting parent verification would be most suitable for members who do not wish to conduct DNA testing on recipient females.

Genomic and DNA Services

We include this section each time: Angus Australia provides a range of Genomic products available to both seedstock and commercial producers. In addition, Angus Australia offers a comprehensive range of DNA Parentage