Smart Farming

Since it was established 125 years ago, DeLaval has been focusing on solutions for the dairy industry. Founded in 1878 by Swedish inventor Gustav DeLaval, the company has now evolved into a major global player in the dairy equipment market and for animal husbandry. The global spread and long history has given DeLaval broad expertise in the various aspects of milk farming, which the company has developed into the concept of “Smart Farming.” For DeLaval, Smart Farming is about empowering today’s dairy farmers with the decision tools and automation technologies that seamlessly integrate products, services and knowledge for better quality milk, herd management, productivity and profit.

Smart Farming is thus about innovation, especially the ability to harness automation and information technology for the efficient use of resources, resulting in higher milk production and improved cost control. For this, DeLaval is the only supplier in the industry that can provide solutions to satisfy a holistic view of farm profitability through all areas of Smart Farming. All of DeLaval’s products, except for Herd Management, are developed using Solid Edge® software from Siemens Digital Industries Software.

Many and varied needs of milk farmers around the world

DeLaval has been using Solid Edge since 1998, which is a real marquee year for the company. In addition to implementing its 3D computer-aided design (CAD) system, DeLaval also launched its first voluntary milking system (VMS), a milking robot designed to take the pressure off the tight schedules of modern milk farming and make the farmer’s life and work easier.

“Today’s farmers are generally very demanding regarding their choice of technical equipment,” says Anders Jansson, CAD system administrator at DeLaval. “Their equipment needs to work reliably 24/7, and we need to make sure that it is able to do that over a long period of time. Even though the challenges for milk farmers are similar around the world, they are also different in many respects depending on the size of the farm and kind of animals they herd.”

As the company is active in more than 130 countries, DeLaval needed to provide a number of products suited to the various needs of milk farmers all over the world. The production of milk is increasing and, besides cows, there are also goats, sheep and buffalos that are part of animal husbandry and dairy farming. In numbers, this means that DeLaval has more than 140 products just for dairy farming that need to be maintained and developed on a continuous basis. Jansson says that DeLaval has a very customer-driven philosophy and constantly adapts to the customers’ demands, and thus needs to be able to re-use components in different products to be efficient. DeLaval also has the need to share design data across the organization, which is made possible through the JT™ data format.

Jansson says that Solid Edge was selected after a careful benchmarking procedure. DeLaval used a system from Intergraph. Then, in the late 1990s, the company evaluated what was to become Solid Edge. “Already at that point, we understood that this was a future-oriented software in the making. This was the embryo to the Solid Edge software from Siemens Digital Industries Software, which has been proven to be a perfect fit for us since then,” says Jansson.