Dear Afimilk Employees,
Our plan for growth acceleration in 2022 is underway. The year started off strong with a record first quarter. We have the innovative products needed to support growth and our teams are bigger and stronger at our headquarters and across the regions. Operational Excellence is our theme in 2022. We have the plans and the resources to do an outstanding job. Our success depends on our ability to execute our plans.
We spend a lot of time and effort attracting the best talent. We plan to continue building our teams around the globe to ensure we have the capacity to uncover many more business opportunities and the capability to train and support our customers. This also means much higher production capacity and with the challenging circumstances of post COVID business symptoms, the stress on our supply chain, procurement, and logistics is enormous.
Last year, we started selling software and tags as a service, gradually transforming our business model and better serving our customers. Although our team and dealers are used to selling capital equipment, not services, we expect to change and transition to a service oriented mindset.
In 2022, we will further increase our investment in digital marketing to generate mass leads, while monitoring the different campaigns to optimize the process. We are still putting an emphasis on customer success, as we get closer to the end users of our products, ensuring their satisfaction and creating further business opportunities with them, for us and for our dealers, beyond the initial sale. Last year, we successfully rebuilt our Engineering team. We now expect this team to demonstrate further improvements with the quality of our products and the scaling up production to meet the growing demand.
Our teams recently released the latest farm server version, AfiFarm 5.5. This version, together with new versions of AfiCloud and Afi2Go, introduce new features and improvements to these products. Afifarm 5.5 supports our new leg tag version, AfiAct III. We decided to wait until the launch of AfiAct III tags until later in 2022. This allows us to focus on doubling the production of AfiCollar, which is based on the same electronic parts. AfiAct III will be released to the market as soon as production capacity allows us to produce it in mass quantities.
In 2022, we expect to finish the development of the first production ready version of Synergy (our robotic milking system). We expect the product to be successfully deployed in two Israeli farms. Although this represents a delay from our previous plan, the execution of the new plan is a top priority for our R&D and Operations.
With the unprecedented growth in sales of standalone cow monitoring systems, we are required to support our new installations of AfiCollar and have been resolving obstacles that arise in the field. Both AfiCollar and AfiPass II are new products and are expected to be stress tested in 2022 by various milking parlor configurations.
We are the biggest critiques of ourselves. As we grow much faster, we identify many areas that require attention. Improvements and changes need to be implemented to ensure we can effectively deal with much higher scale of the business and managing bigger teams. Nevertheless, we celebrate our accomplishments and the progress we made in recent years. We are a much stronger company today than we’ve ever been, and we expect this trajectory of improvement to continue.
Kind regards,
Yuval Rachmilevitz, CEO