Fujitsu Launches Cloud Service for Beef Cattle Production

Tokyo, September 28, 2012

Fujitsu today announced software as a service (SaaS) intended to help the livestock industry manage the raising of beef cattle. The Beef Cattle Management SaaS adds to Fujitsu's ICT services that support the food and agricultural industries—the Akisai cloud for agribusiness.

This SaaS aims to help raise beef cattle enables integrated management and visualization of a variety of data, including on individual cattle, the cumulative cost of input up to a given point in time for each head of cattle (cost of work in progress), and day-to-day feeding. This thereby contributes to high-quality, low-cost cattle production. With farmers raising more cattle with less staff, this will help them maintain quality, control costs, and improve their technological edge. For the JA Group, a nationwide organization of farmers that plays a major role in Japan's wagyu, or Japanese beef, industry, this SaaS not only will reduce the effort involved in managing individual cattle, it will also increase agricultural leadership through data analysis.

Going forward, Fujitsu plans to link this service to others it offers, including the Gyuho system that provides animal husbandry support so as to raise cattle birth rates to one calf per year, and the Business Management SaaS, which adds improved managerial capabilities to the food and agriculture cloud. These links will support integrated cattle management as a business through ICT.

As Japan's cattle farmers grow older, the number of people working in the industry is declining, while at the same time the number of cattle per farm is increasing. This means farmers need to be able to manage many head of cattle with little staff. And with feed costs rising worldwide, farmers need to consider ways to control costs and optimize feeding.

Modern cattle farming covers a variety of disciplines, including breeding, feeding, and drug administration management, but because they are so disparate, farmers have been hard-pressed to make effective use of relevant data. A unified way to analyze all the data that arises, from birth to shipment, is becoming vitally important for properly raising and managing each head of cattle.

As of today, Fujitsu is offering this beef cattle-raising management SaaS as an addition to Akisai, its existing agricultural cloud for the food and agricultural industries. This provides unified data management to the livestock industry, helping cattle farmers to increase their work efficiency and to produce quality cattle by visualizing costs and work processes.

Service Features

1. Discover issues related to quality cattle production and improve feeding technique
   This system tracks a wide range of data from birth to shipment, including data on breeding, feeding, work processes, and diseases. This allows for identification of highly rated farmworkers and comparisons of breeding stock to discover issues, with this data used to plan breeding and feeding in order to increase the quality of cattle production.
2. Visualize feed costs to lower production costs
   Farmers can track in real time the cumulative input costs for each head of cattle based on data collected from birth to shipment, including data on breeding, feeding, and diseases. Also, it is possible to check the cumulative costs per head of cattle on a per-pasture basis, so that more efficient stock-raising methods in one pasture can be extended to all pastures. Additionally, because it is possible to track the costs of cattle that are still being raised, farmers can study resource control methods as they apply to costs, such as selection and replacement.
3. Manage many head of cattle with little staff without missing tasks
   Based on basic information for each head of cattle, such as breeding and birth information, the system can predict estrus and birth dates, and can automatically generate lists of upcoming events, so that even a cattle farm with many head of cattle and few workers can avoid missed tasks.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing and Availability

Product name	Price (excluding tax)	Availability
Beef Cattle Management SaaS	From JPY 600,000/year	Immediate

Notes:

• Price per head of cattle under management is JPY 1,200; figure shown here is for 500 head of cattle.
• Additional setup support charges will apply.

Sales Target

60 companies, by end of FY 2014 (Fujitsu's fiscal year ends March 31).