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Growth in 2020 despite Covid-19

Emydex expands in 2020 despite Covid-19 with year-on-year growth in sales

New office openings in Canada and New Zealand. New hires in Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. New customer signings and new plant go-lives.

Sales Growth

In a year dominated by the Covid 19 pandemic, global lockdowns, as well as restrictions on domestic and international travel, 2020 has seen another period of solid performance by Emydex, at a time when all staff in all market offices are working from home since mid-March.

In the first 9 months of 2020, Emydex recorded sales growth of over 10% compared with the same 9-month period last year. Emydex is pleased to see the business continue to grow throughout what are extremely challenging trading conditions.

Remote Working

Restrictions on the international movement of people have had the biggest impact on Emydex this year, with our customers and staff restricted in their ability to visit factories for business analysis engagements and project implementations in person.

South Africa

In September, Steynsburg Pork, a new Emydex customer, went live with the first phase of their Emydex system installation, at their new greenfield plant in South Africa. This new world-class farm and abattoir facility will process up to 4,800 sows per week once operating at full capacity.

Phase 1 of the project saw Emydex go-live with a “door to door” solution, including animal delivery, pig processing kill line, carcass management, into boning, case labelling, warehouse management and sales order picking.

The project was supported on-site by Emydex’s long-standing partner for the African market, Summit Process Solutions, and a special thanks to both Rodney and Jeffrey Macer-Wright for their help and assistance on the ground during the lead up to go-live, and several weeks post-go-live during the project stabilisation phase.

New Zealand

Around the same time, the Wilson Hellaby Group in North Island New Zealand went live with their first Emydex system, a state-of-the-art automated carton labelling system operating in the pack-off area of their beef and lamb boning halls of their Auckland Meat Processors (AMP) plant.

Unmanned labelling stations provide higher quality and consistency of labelling, eliminating errors, reducing reworks and recalls, whilst also reducing labour costs. Improvements in line speed and throughput mean that the automated pack labelling lines can process up to 18 cartons per minute. The system is fully integrated into the boning halls and provides real-time visibility of all stages of the production process for full traceability.

Emydex acknowledges the efforts of Ian Carson, Senior Consultant with Emydex Australia in our Brisbane office, who flew from Brisbane to Auckland and back during the lockdowns in both countries to support the Emydex go-live in the group’s Auckland Meat Processors (AMP) plant in Auckland.

Whilst onsite in AMP, Ian provided the eyes and ears for our system solutions and engineering teams working remotely on the project in our Dublin and Brisbane offices, relaying real-time video footage back to the engineers and testers working on the Emydex system solution on pre-go-live testing. Ian had to self-isolate for 2 weeks on both sides of the trip, going above and beyond the call of duty.

Canada

In Canada, the Emydex team have been working remotely with the Canadian Fishing Company (CANFISCO) to continue implementing Emydex functionality into the organisation remotely.

Having completed the first phase implementation covering Groundfish applications, the focus is now on applications for future improvements, including analysis of expected costs against actual costs, gross margin visibility at the different levels (including vessel, customer, and sales order analysis), as well as the automation of HACCP and QC processes and cold storage invoicing.

In addition, Emydex have also been completing requirements analysis for another multi-plant, major food manufacturing company in Canada. Although the first two factory requirements gathering visits were completed in person, the remaining factories have since been completed virtually using video conference technology again due to travel restrictions.

Expansion

To support growth in our two newest overseas markets, Emydex incorporated two new overseas companies in Canada and New Zealand in November and welcomed new hires to join both teams.

In Canada, Nathan Kelman joins the Emydex Canada team as a Senior Solutions Engineer. With over 8 years of programming experience working in software development roles around the Greater Toronto Area, Nathan will work on Emydex solutions development as well as support with our customers in Canada and the US

In New Zealand, Hermien Van den Berg joined the Emydex New Zealand team in September, as a Senior Project Manager, based in Auckland. With over 10 years’ experience working as a project manager for companies such as Coca-Cola in South Africa, Hermien will manage our growing New Zealand team, working remotely on customer projects including WHL and Silver Fern Farms.

(Jan 2021 update) Vadim Shegay and Wayne McRae also join the growing Emydex NZ team, both as a Senior Solutions Engineers working on ongoing Emydex projects spread over the North and South Islands in New Zealand.

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An accurate diagnosis and treatment

When South African medical device manufacturer Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing needed to replace a manual paper-based quality control system, they looked North to Emydex to advise and assist in implementing an electronic solution.

Introducing the client

Emydex has a strong presence in Sub-Saharan Africa working with their local market partner, Summit Process Solutions, with offices in Pretoria and Cape Town. Together Emydex and Summit have 10 customers spread across South Africa, Namibia and Botswana operating 17 separate plants, each operating Emydex at the core.

The partnership recently added Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing, based in South Africa, to their client base. Marlin Laboratories is a specialist in the design, manufacture, and implementation of reverse osmosis water purification systems for the renal industry in South Africa. The company’s service teams regularly provide servicing and measuring the quality of the water, to life-saving dialysis machines installed across South Africa.

All Emydex clients are important and an integral part of industry supply chains within the countries in which they operate. As specialists in the food supply chain, it was interesting to see how easily the Emydex software was customisable to support Marlin Laboratories. This was particularly sensitive to drive quality control, as it operates in the critical healthcare arena where Quality is a matter of life and death.

The opportunity

Marlin Laboratories, in addition to their manufacturing competence, have a team of 25 in-field service technicians working at over 200 sites in hospitals throughout South Africa. Increasing volumes, together with increased reporting and compliance requirements, created the need to evaluate a solution to address the challenges of their manual and paper-based process.

The manual processes were becoming a challenge for the field technicians as well as the back-office finance and administration head office team. There were various bottlenecks at month end caused by increased data gathering at each site, followed by regional consolidation of the data being sent to the Head Office, causing a challenge in responding to their client needs.

This was the initial motivation to consider a new approach, together with the many obvious benefits of moving from a paper based to a digital solution. The additional benefits envisaged improved data accuracy, consistency, predictable process efficiencies as well as integration logistics and finance systems.

“The drive to make this change came from a need to improve operational efficiency plus the heavy demands of evidence-based compliance within the medical industry bodies together with the needs for governance and risk management for our own clients.”
Mark Pretorius, CEO, Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing

Emydex and Summit Process Solutions were tasked to review the existing processes and to recommend the design for an advanced mobile technology-based solution that would simplify and standardise the business processes and business model.

What we did

Emydex and Summit worked closely with Marlin Laboratories Management and field technicians to examine existing processes, how they worked and how we could create improvements and streamline their existing processes and operations.

“The major challenge for Marlin Laboratories was the volume of paperwork created at every site visit. As we worked through that, we highlighted other opportunities to enhance training and skills by implementing a standardised technology based approach for Training and Operations, to improve the productivity of each engineer in the servicing of the more than 700 units across the country.”
Jeffrey Macer-Wright, Technical Director, Summit Process Solutions

This was precisely the sort of challenge the Emydex Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) was built for. EQMS is a software system that allows various industry operations to be analysed and to be captured in process steps in consistent procedures. This approach not only covers steps for each individual, but also next steps and actions for other colleagues involved in the end-to-end process-based workflow.

With the workflow capturing the confirmation of actions and relevant data, complete results are then accurately loaded into the cloud based database for access by Head Office enabling real time response and reporting for completed tasks, replacing many manual tasks.

The application can run in either on-line mode or in offline mode with data synchronisation with the cloud at convenient times.

Going Live

The system went live, country-wide, toward the end of 2019.
Ongoing reviews of the new system and other back office legacy systems will continue to yield productivity and efficiency improvements with effective reporting and data analysis.

“Since going live, we have continued with ongoing process reviews of the new system as we further optimise productivity and take further steps for integration with our other back office processes for logistics and finance systems”
Mitch WIshart, Service and Training Manager, Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing

The results

The results and benefits from the introducing the new system are now being experienced in various ways. According to the team at Marlin Laboratories, the new Emydex tablet based EQMS has brought about several improvements:

  • Asset management has been enhanced
  • All completed workflows and reports are uploaded from the service locations eliminating paperwork bottlenecks experienced at month end.
  • Accuracy has improved, with proof through reports and evidence-based compliance
  • Immediate access to data in validating results of current and trend results
  • Visibility of team performance and where there might be areas for improvement
  • Logistics are being simplified, with tracking of spare parts and consumables feeding into parts management which helps planning and projections
  • Compliance and traceability has improved

In other's words

“Moving from a paper-based system to state-of-the-art technology is a business engineering project that involves everyone in the team. Technology in the workflows running on a tablet standardised everything for us. The team have embraced the transformation.

The team on the ground with varying skill levels have all benefited from the standardisation. It proves that Emydex can help small companies like us to leverage the cloud-based technologies previously only available to large enterprises.”
Jen Marques, Emydex systems Administrator, Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing

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Emydex growth in overseas markets

An Emydex company update as the world begins to unlock from the global Coronavirus pandemic that has severely affected the global economy since the beginning of this year.

Having just closed out our latest financial year-end to April 30th, Emydex is pleased to announce that the company grew by a further 20% year-on-year this year, following similar strong growth when the company grew by 30% last year.

In line with our company vision, over the past year, Emydex added further Tier 1 customers in our chosen markets, on the strength of which the company has expanded its presence in all the markets we serve, with further new hires added across the board, detailed below.

In addition, Emydex has added a suite of new products and modules to our factory floor solutions offerings, including a range of products focussed on larger multi-site meat, fish, and food processors. New products include the Emydex Enterprise Management System (EMS), Emydex Exchange as well a suite of group-level applications like Master Data Management for products, labels etc. In addition, consolidated group reporting, BI dashboards and a host of new web-based and Android applications are now available.
For further information read our New Year, New Products news story.

Europe

In Europe, following the successful implementation of Danish Crown’s Emdyex pilot project in the group’s Hörby plant in Sweden (read story), Emdyex are now live in the Danish Crown Scan Hide facility which processes premium hides for high-end products. We are also currently working with Danish Crown on several additional new plant roll-outs running in parallel, including Emydex factory floor systems for Danish Crown’s Aalborg plant in Denmark.

Emydex is also working with our long-standing customer, Kepak Group, to upgrade six of their beef and lamb primal processing plants in Ireland to our latest Emydex version 5 software. Also in Ireland, Ashbourne Meats have gone live with Emydex in their two processing plants in Roscrea and Naas (read story).

Africa

In Africa, building on our existing Emydex customer installations operating across South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia, Emydex are working on a new greenfield plant implementation for Steynsburg Pork in South Africa due to go live in Q3 2020.

In addition, Emydex has successfully implemented our Enterprise Quality Management System (read story) with new customers including Purecare in South Africa that are using our quality management system to complete scheduled services and emergency repairs on reverse osmosis machines which feed dialysis machines within hospitals throughout Southern Africa. Purecare management now has instant visibility of jobs that the technicians are completing in the field and can invoice for these services, including the quantities of spare parts, with ease.

Australia & New Zealand

Building on our earlier successes with Emydex customers such as O’Connor Beef in Victoria, Harvey Beef (read story) in Western Australia, and the Sunpork Group (read story) in Queensland, the Emydex team in our Brisbane office (read story) are currently working on a number of new customer project implementations including WAMMCO (Katanning) and Southern Meats (Goulburn), Mort & Company, as well as Silver Fern Farms and Wilson Hellaby/Auckland Meat Processors in New Zealand.

Our Emydex Australia office also welcomed new additions to the team including Karen Rogers, ex-Sastek/Cedar Creek as a business analyst working alongside Ian Carson, as well as Charles Joseph, Project Manager. Most recently, Emydex welcomed both Allan Nielsen and David Wang to the Emydex Australia software delivery team, both who join at the same time, coming from JBS Australia where they worked in JBS’s Brisbane software development team for 8 and 5 years, respectively. Utilising remote working technologies both Allan and David are integrating and collaborating successfully with the local Brisbane team, as well as the Emydex teams based in Dublin and Toronto while working from home remotely due to the Covid19 restrictions.

North America

In North America, Emydex continues to work with existing customers such as Donalds Fine Foods, with pork processing plants running Emydex box labelling systems at their plants in Richmond and Langley in British Columbia, as well as Moosejaw, Saskatchewan.

In BC Canada, Emydex is recently live in two of the Canadian Fishing Company’s (Canfisco) plants located in Richmond and Delta Pacific. Emydex is live within Canfisco’s two groundfish processing factories integrated into their MS Dynamics 365 ERP system.

In Wisconsin, US, Emydex are working with Strauss Brands, a large beef, veal, and lamb processor to implement Emydex box labelling systems on their factory floor integrated to their Dynamics 365 ERP system.

Supporting Terry McCorriston (ex-CSB systems) who has been Emydex’s agent in the region for the past 3 years, based in the Greater Toronto area of Canada, Emydex welcome Irish-born, John Keating to the Emydex North America team, as a senior engineer to support our growing North America customer base as well as our global 24x7 support team.

Looking Forward

With all countries in the markets that Emydex serves, who are beginning to take their economies out of lockdown post the pandemic crisis, Emydex look forward to a positive second half of the year. The company will focus our efforts on delivering on commitments to our customers in Europe, Africa, Australasia, and North America.

Emydex will also continue to further our advances with respect to our software platform helping to enable automation within food processing factories. Automation delivers labour savings as well as improved productivity and efficiencies. With the need to maintain social distancing in this new world order, more and more factories will look to automation, as a means of safeguarding their businesses against any further pandemics that might arise in the future. Machines don’t get sick, at the end of the day.

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When Canfisco went fishing for an IT partner

Following acquisition and growth, The Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco) found themselves with a variety of different legacy IT systems, all working independently. They turned to Emydex to help land one system that integrated everything.

Meet the client

The Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco) has sustainably harvested wild fish from the coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest for over 110 years. The company operates the largest fishing fleet in British Columbia, over 850 vessels, that every year lands over 100 million pounds of mostly salmon, herring, rockfish, halibut and hake. Landed fish is supplied to the company’s nine processing plants located on the pacific coast in Richmond, Prince Rupert, Greater Vancouver, and Alaska.

The opportunity

Canfisco has grown both organically and through acquisition. As each new acquisition was moved into the Delta Pacific Seafood location, the software and processes were not consolidated into a single integrated process or software application. This left Canfisco with six different major applications and many Excel applications to compensate for the different systems at work throughout the group.

“Company acquisitions had left us with a patchwork quilt of components and old systems that were handling all of our processing.”
John Capling, Project Manager, Canfisco

However, the greatest risk to the business came from the out-of-date applications running on an over 25-year old Unix platform with limited hardware support. This environment left a very disjointed operation that only worked due to the efforts of staff acting as the glue to keep everything working together. Before Emydex came on board, Canfisco had at least five BOM process, four box labelling process and three separate financial applications in place in the organization.

What we did

Canfisco needed a new IT system that could provide a single source of the truth for the organization, providing improved visibility and measurement throughout the business, streamlining administration and, ultimately, improving the performance of the company.

The consensus within the various departments and plants was that any new software solution should be able to replicate what they were already doing, process-wise, i.e. it should keep the good things that worked well and with which everyone was familiar. To this, we should add some magic in the form of some low-hanging savings improvements, whilst at the same time providing the foundation for a software system that can grow into a more advanced solution over time.

Although we are replicating Canfisco functionality I was impressed to see how the Emydex team automated the link between the plant’s recorded catch of fish to actual sales, to ensure Canfisco sales can presell the fresh fish. This ensures they can get maximum value for the catch versus having to freeze the fish for less profits.
Terry McCorriston, Sales Manager/Business Analyst, Emydex North America

Going Live

Canfisco understood that they needed to address the highest risk area which was the groundfish applications running on the old Unix system so a phased implementation was taken to minimise any operation interruptions. After initial consulting and analysis, it was decided to go live with the ground fish box labelling and fillet line in December 2019 and bring on the port receiving in spring of 2020.

The Results

Key to the success of this project was to ensure it would be a gentle evolution and not a revolution. Keeping staff at all levels throughout the operation happy was very important and Emydex was careful to tread lightly. The most obvious improvement has been the elimination of the major risk of running the business on antiquated unsupported Data General (DG) Unix equipment. While there are a few minor applications still on the Unix platform, the team is working to quickly migrate them in the next phase.

Phase one has been completed but already administration efficiency has improved, as expected, thanks to reduced duplication of entry into multi applications and processes. Time consuming consolidation has been reduced and as other fish species are migrated to the new system in upcoming phases, staff will see all of the improvements fall into place.

“Emydex combined a bunch of old systems into one to handle all of our processing. Now everything is processed and tracked through one piece of software. Phase one went very well and so far, it is looking very good and the great thing is there wasn’t a steep learning curve for our people on the floor. Visibility has improved greatly, and we know real efficiencies are coming down the line.

Emydex took what we liked from the old systems and mirrored it, especially with scales and processes – things are labelled now and tracked automatically as opposed to manual entry of old.”
John Capling, Project Manager, Canfisco

There is now better traceability of fish from catch, through processing, to the end sale. Operational performance has improved too due to reporting on giveaway and production yields (with a potential of 2% improvement in raw material utilization) and, of course, Emydex has provided the foundation to build the operational performance measurements over time.

Interestingly, most of the implementation was done remotely which saved costs for the client and also worked out perfectly as the Covid-19 pandemic struck right in the middle of the project and had little effect on our timelines.

“I was happiest with the Emydex team’s flexibility to work with Canfisco to adapt (the software) to allow a phased implementation. I was also impressed that Emydex was able to handle the volume of transactions from day one of going live.”
John Capling, Project Manager, Canfisco

What's Next?

This is the first phase of the implementation – the next phases will cover other fish species – and it builds the foundation applications for future improvements, including analysis of expected costs against actual costs, gross margin visibility at the different levels (including vessel, customer and sales order analysis). Improvements in dry goods control will come next as will the automation of HACCP and QC processes and cold storage invoicing.

In other's words

“Emydex spoke our language, much more than Microsoft… they understood our industry and our business. The (Emydex) system is friendlier, easier to use, intuitive and when the warehouse guys saw it they gave us their blessing so the decision to run with it was a no-brainer in the end. It has replaced very old legacy systems that weren’t integrated and left us very exposed to risk. The result is a solution that’s much more efficient and customisable so that we can add functionality as people have requested it.

The Emydex team were great – very responsive and easy to work with, despite the time difference… very professional and they really know their business. I’m looking forward to Emydex expanding further into our other processes, cold storage, our warehouses and beyond”
Mark Cornell, Senior Vice President

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Improvements by the country mile

How traditional, community-oriented company Ashbourne Meat Processors embraced change through Emydex

Meet the client

Ashbourne Meat Processors is one of Ireland’s most successful exporters of premium chilled beef products. Founded in 1985, the company exports high quality products all over the world and is proud to be recognised as a family whose expertise and knowledge is passed down from one generation to another. There are nearly 200 people in the company family working in two facilities in the centre of Ireland – Roscrea (slaughtering and cold-storage facilities) and Naas (deboning and cold storage).

Ashbourne Meat Processors is a firm believer in leveraging advanced technology and production facilities.

The opportunity

Ashbourne Meat Processors’ two plants were essentially working in isolation from each other on outdated systems that required a lot of manual input and data entry. The abattoir in Roscrea would take in livestock and create the relevant paperwork. When the carcases were transferred to Ashbourne Meat Processors’ facility in Naas (and to other facilities operated by the company’s clients all over the country), new paperwork would have to be created. This was extremely inefficient and left the company open to human error, duplication and lack of visibility and control.

There were also issues with compliance as the legacy systems used in both operations were not integrated with the Department of Agriculture systems and so there was a need for even more data entry.

“One of the biggest problems is we didn’t have integration with the Department of Agriculture. We knew we had to move on, to integrate and put all of this technology to work for us. Emydex came on board and handled everything. 95% of the carcasses go from Naas to Roscrea and all the paperwork is now electronic and automatic and we can monitor everything remotely which, as the pandemic has proved, is more important than it was.”
PJ Butler, Roscrea Plant Manager

What we did

Emydex is the acknowledged leader when it comes to process development for the food industry and when Ashbourne Meat Processors decided to overhaul the IT infrastructure and embrace the latest processing technology, they called Emydex.

Following a project scoping exercise, the team agreed to divide the job into two phases – one for the slaughter plant in Roscrea and the other for the Deboning operation in Naas. Connecting the two facilities was an obvious but important improvement.

In phase one, The Naas Deboning operation was upgraded by Emydex to deliver an end-to-end factory floor solution. Today Emydex handles the entire processing procedures within this plant, from Intake, Into / Out of Boning, Packing, Dispatch and Warehousing. Emydex also generates all the appropriate Dispatch Documentation, transfers traceability data to customers and allows for full forward and backward traceability. Prior to Emydex’s introduction, Work Orders were paper-based and were phoned down to the operators. Now this is all controlled within Emydex which means there is less likelihood of human error and the whole process is now more streamlined and controlled.

In phase two, the abattoir and cold storage facility 100 kilometres away in Roscrea, County Tipperary, was completely overhauled with everything from animal intake, supplier POs, inter-company paperwork and all procedures – from processing to packing, including sales picking – newly streamlined and automated. Labelling from boning through storage and out in orders was part of the specification as was the automatic electronic generation of all documentation. Real-time data is now updated constantly between the two plants and a new dispatch system created.

Going Live

Emydex systems went live in Naas in January 2019 and Roscrea in October 2019.

The results

Animal intake at the abattoir is now seamlessly and automatically integrated with the Government’s veterinary body, AIMS. Ear tags are scanned and all animal data is confirmed and registered and the Department of Agriculture is notified automatically. This improvement alone saves thousands of man hours every year and completely eliminates human error at the intake point.

“The old system was labour-intensive and setting up jobs needed a lot of work. Emydex brought in a lot of standardisation which has helped us to complete jobs quicker, weigh boxes quicker and see yields a lot clearer. We became 8% more efficient overnight… we highly recommend Emydex.”
Donal Houlihan, Naas Plant Manager, Ashbourne Meat Processors.

There used to be two separate systems and all sorts of mistakes were created by so much manual data entry. This led to delays in cattle payments and problems in registering the passport details of some animals. Now there is just one system and those errors have been eliminated.

Everything from animal intake to carcass dispatch and box generation is automated, tacked, reported and visible all the way from start to finish.

Overall, and almost immediately, efficiency was improved, paperwork virtually eliminated, errors drastically reduced, and profitability increased throughout the company.

In other's words

“The savings in administration were immediate – we saved a labour unit in the office immediately – and the piles of paperwork and stacks of files are a thing of the past. We’re almost paperless now, except for the cheques which some of our more traditional farming suppliers prefer over electronic payments. I estimate that actual physical paperwork has decreased by 95% and that’s a huge achievement.”
PJ Butler, Roscrea Plant Manager, Ashbourne Meat Processors

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SunPork scales new heights

How Emydex helped SunPork expand their Swickers Kingaroy operation to become the biggest, fastest, highest quality pork processing operation in Australia.

Meet the client

Through Swickers Kingaroy, SunPork is the largest pig processor in all of Australia, handling 900,000 pigs every year to produce 18% (42 million kilos) of the nation’s pork. The group is proud to be Australian farmer-owned and a direct employer of 1,400 people across the country.

In addition to the domestic market, SunPork exports 7 million kilos of pork to seven other countries and creates 140 million meals worldwide annually. They do this through 37 Australian farms in three states and six New Zealand farms on the two islands. They also have three feed-mills, a directly owned abattoir, major interest in a second facility, as well as two value-add facilities.

The opportunity

Following the rebuild of the Export Boning Room after a fire at SunPorks’s Swickers abattoir in Queensland, the group began an additional AUD$ 64m (Euro €40m) investment in a new state-of-the-art facility in 2016. It set out to become the most efficient pork processing line in Australia with a capacity to process up to 750 pigs per hour, whilst maintaining a relentless focus on quality.

In December 2019, the SunPork Group completed the Swickers abattoir expansion in Kingaroy, located three hours outside Brisbane, Queensland, creating more than 200 jobs in the process.

“Over the past 18 months Swickers has constructed the most advanced pork abattoir in Australia, and certainly one of the best in the world. Many producers and wholesalers will rely on the efficiency and quality standards in our plant to maintain and develop their business well into the future. This facility is a cornerstone of the SunPork business and we now have foundations that will underpin our long-term growth strategies.”

Dr Robert van Barneveld, SunPork Group CEO and Managing Director

So how do you become the fastest and most efficient pork processing facility in the country? You bring in one of the world’s leading providers of factory floor software for food processors. You bring in Emydex.

What we did

The Sunpork project began with the design and development of a new state-of-the-art, fully automated kill line system for the Swickers processing plant, in line with Smart Manufacturing (Industry 4.0) best practice. 

The main goal of this project was to interface the Emydex MES to an automated factory floor system consisting of a network of RFID readers and sensors, as well as multiple (20) in-line automated machines, connected to Emydex via the PLC layer. This meant integrating with equipment supplied by Frontmatec, Denmark, that included a carcass opener, automated splitting, AutoFom grader and a carcass stamp printer. 

Other equipment included a PorkScan grader, automatic track scales as well as LED/Light and gate control systems, in addition to other devices to manage routing. The use of multiple real-time vet inspection and grading stations also controlled the flow and routing of carcasses.

RFID integration required the design and build of standard integrations (APIs) to interact with RFID tracking systems on the kill floor. The RFID system provides real-time carcass identification and tracking, enabling full traceability of the carcass throughout processing.

As part of the project, the Emydex engineering team also designed and built a new centralised communication service, called the Data Communication Interface (DCI). DCI eliminates the need for individual terminals to have direct communication with the various integrated hardware and allows terminals to receive the data input in a unified format via this single central communication point. 

The project also delivered additional new innovative systems for stock delivery and pen management, automated carcass routing and an automated chiller sortation system based on configurable business rules.

Going Live

The system began commissioning at the SunPork Swickers plant in July 2019.

The results

The effects were immediate, and the system keeps improving day by day.

“The new kill line is significantly more efficient than the previous line, and it will continue to improve as we move forward. Manpower has reduced in terms of two shifts to one, while the new floor will allow us double output. There are two real and obvious benefits that Emydex has brought to SunPork. One, we have more data points where we can collect manufacturing information from around the floor and two; we have replaced many manual tasks such as populating spreadsheets.

Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary

“What makes the Swickers plant unique is that it not only processes product on behalf of SunPork, but also provides a service kill for other companies in the pork industry and so had to have a lot of flexibility not usually found in normal processing facilities. The need to meet the requirements of each customer utilising the service provided by the plant meant Emydex had to deliver a system that could not only operate at very high speed, but also deliver the ability to change the way each customer’s pigs were prepared and to signal this in real-time to the operators on the production floor”

Ian Carson, Technical Sales Director, Emydex Australia

What’s next?

The next phase is to refine and perfect Emydex’s ‘Factory of The Future system’ on the ground at Swickers and then roll Emydex systems out to further processing functions at Kingaroy and SunPork’s other facility in Queensland.

In other's words

“We gave Emydex a very tough ask to design and build a system for a kill floor that itself had not even been physically designed yet. Many other system developers would have walked away at various points in the project when things got tough but Emydex regularly went above and beyond the call of duty and I have huge respect for them for that. Their guys were out here working seven days a week and were as invested, committed as we were. It was a new world for both of us and I can’t fault them at all.”

Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary

“The Emydex team has been superb… from the beginning showing a willingness to understand the requirements and design a custom solution for us… (there are) different demands here in Australia to those plants in Europe. The difference it has made has been terrific: for example, we used to have two data collection points on the kill floor and now we have 20. The throughput was 300 pigs per hour and now we’re processing between 700 -750 per hour. The value the Emydex team is adding is fantastic. Support is brilliant, with clear concise and well-presented analysis of issues reported, coupled with mitigation, solutions and actions to monitor and implement fixes. Live dashboards will broadcast information to the right people throughout the group worldwide in real-time. We’re very happy to be working with them and would recommend Emydex to any manufacturer anywhere.

Iestyn Thomas, Group IT Manager, Sunpork Group

I would absolutely recommend Emydex because they have invested their time and resources in our business… it means as much to them as it does to us. Some of their guys came out and spent a month working at the coal face and we couldn’t ask for more commitment than that.

Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary

 

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