The study of business process and decision support of raw milk blending for a collecting centre in Thailand

Milk is a high nutrient food source. Its major composition includes water, fat, protein, sugar, vitamin and minerals. In Thailand, milk consumption has been promoted through school dairy projects. There are dairy farms throughout Thailand, of which most are small-sized farms. This leads to an uneven nutrient composition due to different agricultural practices, feed, and environments. Thus, the factors that affect the nutrient composition in raw milk should be studied. The Royal Thai government should encourage farmers to Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) so that the nutrients in raw milk are compliant with national standards. The collecting centre must inspect the nutrient composition to ensure that it meets specifications before it is delivered to milk plants. In addition, the raw milk price depends on the fat content. The collecting centre collects raw milk from farmers twice a day. The results of a survey show that raw milk collected in the morning and afternoon has different nutrient compositions; raw milk in the morning has less fat than milk in the afternoon. After raw milk is delivered to the collecting centre, it is cooled and kept in a storage tank. Then, it must be delivered to the milk plants on a daily basis. Hence, our objective is to formulate a mathematical model to determine how to blend raw milk collected in the morning and afternoon so that the total cost of raw milk is minimised while the nutrient composition specification is satisfied. Then, the model is solved using a spreadsheet, and a decision support system is proposed so that the quality control supervisor can determine how to blend raw milk daily. Finally, the blending model is compared with manual blending using the actual data for ten days. It shows that the average costs of both methods are the same; however, the percentage of passing on total solid is improved from 50% to 70%. In addition, the decision time is reduced from 15 minutes to one minute.