Introduction to MeatMessaging
The cost to industry for missing or incorrect port marks to the US is estimated at $14.5 million per year in the June 2013 report by D.N Harris & Associates on the technical barriers to trade for Australian red meat prepared for MLA and AMIC.
The costs to industry for manual preparation of Meat Transfer Certificates is estimated at a cost of $25 for the labor component per MTC. There are approximately 175,000 paper MTCs per year. This equates to a cost of $4.375 million per year.
The use of the Meat Messaging portal based on the underlying GS1 barcoding and electronic messaging technologies and supply chain standards can readily reduce these two costs (total of $18.875 million) to virtually $0.
The industry web portal (meatmessaging.com) facilitates the collection, processing and reporting of carton GS1 barcode and related data to achieve the requirements of the issued DA Meat Notice “Alternate protocol for managing illegible or missing shipping marks for the USA” and the FSIS Notice 41-15 “Shipping marks-Barcodes.PDF”.
The Meat Messaging portal includes a QA monitoring process that provides a level of reporting on the measured accuracy of the program participants. This process of QA monitoring is utilisedas a validation tool for the endorsement of the updated approved arrangements for the establishments and reporting to government.
Over 50 establishments have signed up to use the meat messaging portal including the three largest processing companies in Australia. Collectively this represents over 70% of the Australian export volume.
The MeatMessaging.com portal is a program reporting to the Australian Meat Industry Language and Standards Committee and is administered by AUS-MEAT Limited.
Establishments wanting to use the Meat Messaging portal need to work through with the system vendors to implement integration with their existing on plant systems. QA also need to ensure the establishment’s approved arrangements are updated to reflect using the Meat Messaging portal.