Leading livestock agents embrace eNVD

Last month, the ISC adoption team presented at an Elders Armidale and Guyra client afternoon, sharing the benefits of the electronic National Vendor Declaration (eNVD) with both producers and agents.

Kate Matthews, Elders’ Sales Support Officer for Armidale and Guyra said the team had wanted to get a better understanding of the eNVD app so they could help clients wanting to shift to digital consignments.

“As livestock agents, we’re supporting clients by helping coordinate the movement of the stock they’re selling and helping facilitate the logistics of any transaction. They are already completing the traditional paper NVDs, but we wanted to give clients the digital option if that was their preference.”  

Demi Lollback, ISC’s Project Manager for Adoption, said that digital consignments  could be a real timesaver for many Elders clients in the New England region. 

“A lot of those guys might only ever send sheep to Guyra saleyards or cattle to Armidale saleyards once or twice a year, so the fact they can set up a template for that consignment type is a real benefit for those producers. It means they’re not reinventing the wheel unnecessarily each time, and they always have the most current NVD version,” she said.

Kate Matthews said the ability to make changes to the consignment online was also a big advantage.  

“We had a couple of clients at the session who have multiple cattle yards on their properties. For those clients, they might be 50km from home when they're loading or unloading stock. The fact they can set up a template in their office at home and then adjust the final numbers or add the transporter details on their mobile phone, even when they’re offline, really appeals to that group,” Kate said. 

“It’s also helping remove human error in a lot of cases. For example, if there’s been a miscount it’s easy to fix it online using the app. With the paper-based system, if there are amendments needed, we have to call the producer and ask them to make the changes, then they have to email that updated version back to us. With the app, they just make the changes then and there.”

ISC’s livestock transport advisor, Wade Lewis, also presented on the day, demonstrating how you can use the app to transfer consignment details to the next person even when you’re offline by sharing a QR code.

“Wade was great in that he was able to give some solid, real-life examples of how it has worked and also address some of the concerns around connectivity by demonstrating the app’s reliability,” Kate said.

The team were also able to see how the mobile version was delivering a more complete consignment than the hard copy NVDs.

“There's often things that can get missed or overlooked on the paper version,” Kate said.

“A lot of that is just because that's the way it’s always been done, and it's been accepted. Now with the eNVD app, you can't move forward until you've completed all the fields, so I think that’s really helping to improve efficiency throughout the consignment process due to the completeness of information.”

Kate said that digital consignment is also helping clients to create more reliable record-keeping.

“There’s a lot of benefits to shifting to the eNVD, but one of the big ones is that it means their records are all there, saved in the system, all accessible in one place for whenever they need them. That’s a huge advantage when it comes to audit time because you’re not running around, trying to gather and check your paper records, it’s already there.”

Kate says there’s been a lot of interest in learning about the event from other Elders offices in northern NSW and she’ll be sharing what she learned with them over the coming weeks.