With popularity of this event soaring over its 47-year history and a place in the Aviagen School difficult to secure, Aviagen China decided to start a school to support its own customers.

Now in its fifth year, the Aviagen China School has built its own reputation amongst the local customers and has grown to host over 50 customer managers from 11 leading companies in 2011.

Han Feng, Vice President of Aviagen China, said: "The original idea was to communicate with our customers and update them and ourselves on many aspects of the industry. Recognising the importance of continuing to build relationships, we decided to try to overcome the limited number of places in the US based Aviagen School, make it easier to attend, remove any visa and travel issues along with the chance to have all proceedings in the Chinese language."

The effort has been rewarded and the week-long event is now well established and sought after by the industry. All of the speakers except one at the China School this year were from the Aviagen Asia Management and Technical Support Team. This offers customers the chance to interact with the speakers, become more familiar with the technical expertise available from Aviagen in the region and improve their awareness of how the different technical disciplines and procedures contribute to the delivery their grand parent or parent stock products.

There were 17 different presentation topics over the week which covered a broad range of subjects for the attendees. Monday commenced with the strategy of dealing with customers from a technical service viewpoint along with marketing and selling in China and a guest speaker, Yasuyuki Tanaka, Technical Service Manager for Nippon Chunky Co Ltd, speaking on 'How a technical team works in Japan'. The second day focused on data analysis and introduced some problem solving exercises, followed by customer service and biosecurity. Wednesday was a half-day engaged in technology, ventilation and vaccination. Thursday described respiratory disease issues, the company technical information and support literature, causes of early and late mortality and basic nutrition. The final day on Friday was dedicated to infertility, nutrition and its implication on the bird's physical quality. The final presentation was on water quality.

The 2011 school was designed to attract and support people with sales and technical service responsibilities in the customer companies. With the earlier schools being dedicated more to production people, the Asian team felt it was a great opportunity to align with these important functions, give them a more in-depth understanding of what goes into the products that they support and also get to know them and their businesses better.

The idea was first proposed by Bruce Evans, Aviagen Regional Technical Service Manager, who explained: "It is a unique chance to get closer and build relations with our customer sales and technical personal and get more people carrying the same out to the industry."

The sentiment was similar with Dominic Elfick, International Product Manager, who commented: "It was a good opportunity to get to know our counterparts in sales and technical service in China and exchange information. The school went well with many customers asking if we would run further courses during the year."

The value and success of the school is evident by the rising number of attendees and the supporting comments in the school survey.

Mr Han added: "We are very happy with the school. Now all the customers, large and small are sending more people to attend each event. We believe it will help us all make better decisions and improve the future performance of the industry and our breeding stock."