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Oliver Carty improves financial management with Simply Dynamics

Oliver Carty Brand
Simply Dynamics improves financial management for Ireland’s largest bacon producer

  • ERP solution from Simply Dynamics enabling 50% time reduction to run financial reports for Oliver Carty
  • 40% reduction in time to complete cheque run process for finance department
  • Robust EDI inbound and outbound message management

Dublin, 26th February 2013 – Simply Dynamics, a leading provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, today announced that it has implemented an ERP solution for Irish pork, bacon and rasher producer Oliver Carty. The new solution is supporting the company’s on-going expansion and providing them with greater visibility and management of key financial functions.

The Simply Dynamics engagement with Oliver Carty has a contract to the value of €80,000.

After a site visit and analysis of their existing systems, Emydex proposed to implement their replacement Production Management system in two initial project phases.

Oliver Carty is a family run Irish business located in Athlone and is one of Ireland’s largest producers of bacon. It currently has 140 employees which increases substantially at different times of the year to meet seasonal demand and has a turnover of €45 million. Oliver Carty supplies a range of branded and own brand pork, bacon and rasher products to Ireland’s key retailers.

Oliver Carty operated an amalgamation of four different software systems, namely financial, intake, production, and dispatch. The interaction between the four systems was minimal, causing serious delays with the availability of real-time information and reporting bottlenecks.

After a full analysis of the existing software, Oliver Carty decided to replace their entire system with two fully integrated software solutions that could manage all of the financial and factory floor production processes from door-to-door.

Simply Dynamics was chosen for its Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP solution. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is providing the finance department with immediate access to information such as order history, credit management, order status, and claims processing.

Oliver Carty has achieved some significant benefits as a result of the new solution including a 50% reduction in the time taken to run financial reports and a 40% reduction in the time to complete the cheque run process.

The Microsoft Dynamics Nav system delivered by Simply Dynamics integrates fully with Oliver Carty’s production management software, which was provided by Emydex Technology. The combination of the Simply Dynamics and Emydex systems enables communication and synchronisation of both master and transactional data from all departments within the organisation to Microsoft Dynamics Nav. This fully integrated solution can now be applied to any future Emydex and Simply Dynamics implementations.

Nicole Verdon, financial controller, Oliver Carty said, “The integration between Simply Dynamics and Emydex provides us with instant visibility and traceability across the entire organisation. The Simply Dynamics solution has also streamlined all our processes and we now have real-time access to our key performance indicators such as yield, pricing and invoicing data for the company.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is also enabling Oliver Carty to manage multiple sales order processes including Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which is essential in the food distribution industry for communication with its retail customers. It also has the ability to account for catch weights, enabling Oliver Carty to manage products priced by weight but whose weight varies.

Ted Carty, managing director, Oliver Carty commented, “We operate in a market where the price of raw materials are constantly changing so we need to have the most accurate information at any given time. Simply Dynamics has provided us with highly integrated, real-time information at our fingertips, enabling us to make fast and smart business decisions.”

Willie Fitzgerald, Sales Manager, Simply Dynamics said, “Microsoft Dynamics NAV has given Oliver Carty the ability to simplify access to business critical financial information and enhance its control and visibility over an expanding business. As the company continues to grow Microsoft Dynamics NAV has the flexibility to change and grow with them and meet the unique needs of a company operating in the food distribution industry.”

David McMahon, CEO, Emydex said “the Emydex factory floor data capture and production reporting system is designed to be ‘open’ such that it can interface to, and exchange data with any 3rd party ERP or financial system, as well as any 3rd party Cold Store or Supplier systems. The fact we have now collaborated closely with Simply Dynamics to build a bridge to Microsoft’s NAV ERP system is a win-win for all parties but especially our customers. “Build once, use many times” means the integration points between Emydex and NAV come practically out-of-the-box reducing installation and testing time and hence cost.”

Oliver Carty plans to extend its Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution to incorporate other areas of the business such as inventory and warehousing over the coming months.

Source article: Simply Dynamics – Oliver Carty news article
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Emydex rollout across Dawn Meats Group

Dawn Meats Brand
An Emydex customer since 2007, the Dawn Meats Group is one of the largest suppliers of Irish and British Beef, Pork and Lamb in Europe.

Last year (2012) was a milestone year for the group as it secured a 5 year €300m contract for McDonalds, in addition to building a new state of the art patty plant at Carroll’s Cross, Co Waterford, as well as acquiring West Devon Meats in South West England. This follows the group’s acquisition of the Duerden beef abattoir in the Lake District, and the upgrade of their beef slaughter and processing plant in Cardington, UK in 2011.

Dawn Meats began rolling out Emydex’s Production Management software system across the group during 2008. Four years later, Emydex continues to operate as the group standard factory floor data capture and production and traceability reporting system in 11 of the 13 plants within the group including Dawn Meats France.

From Carcass intake, through boning, further processing, packing, box stock and dispatch, Emydex captures and reports on production data, enabling Dawn Meats to analyse and manage their stocks, yields and dispatches, whilst maintaining full food chain traceability.

Commenting on the Emydex system roll-out Shane Slattery, Group IT Manager with Dawn Meats said “Emydex is a central pillar of our strategic IT plan going forward, and our goal now is to concentrate on completing the roll-out of Emydex to our primary processing sites by year end. This plan may seem aggressive, but we believe that it is achievable on account of the inherent flexibility of the core Emydex product to handle any differences in the business processes required in our disparate sites”.

Plans are to complete the Emydex roll-out across the group in 2013, with the implementation of the system at Dawn’s Lamb processing plant in Ballyhaunis in Ireland, as well as the roll-out of Emydex’s kill line & payments systems to all of Dawn’s slaughter plants within the group.

For more information on the Emydex kill line system contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Future Trends

What are meat processors and retailers currently looking for from IT systems? What is driving that demand (e.g. legislation, environmental and/or other)? What are the general trends? Future trends?

In our experience meat processors are generally looking for five things when deciding to implement new software systems.

  • Full integration between Financial and production systems
  • Dynamic Yield reports that highlight areas where improvements can be made
  • Dynamic reporting of the status of production against plan
  • Accurate reporting of stock, with age analysis and availability
  • Fast, accurate order picking and containerising, ensuring documentation does not hold up deliveries.

The drivers are usually one or a combination of requirements to drive efficiencies, legislative demands, customer demand and ultimately profitability.

Future trends are definitely towards more automation in processing. Emydex are actively involved in shop floor automation projects specifically designed to improve yield, throughput and efficiency.

Minimizing operator involvement is also high on a list of customer priorities, Emydex systems are being used to plan production in the office and then issue those plans to the shop floor to control production using RFID tracking and shop floor automation, with the minimum of operator involvement.

A key benefit that results from implementation of all of the above functionality is traceability that is second to none. Emydex systems record the full history of everything that has happened to a product, whether it is a forward trace, backward trace or mass-balance traceability report. Furthermore, for re-usable containers such as refrigerated containers, crates, dolav’s (pallet boxes), hooks and gambrels, Emydex can even trace the history of every product that has ever been in that container.

Emydex on Demand

The Emydex team have been quietly developing a solution which we expect to have a major impact on small to medium size processors who do not have their own in house IT departments.

Emydex on Demand utilises the power and availability of the internet for the deployment of new standard solutions being developed. Emydex on Demand is a hybrid solution, not running fully as “Software as a Service” (i.e. Hosted in the cloud);

Emydex recognise that processors still need to be able to label boxes even if the network connection is down. As such the new standard Emydex application programs for data collection will run on the data collection terminal itself, not on the internet, the terminals will also have their own off line database allowing operation to continue even if internet connection is not available.

The Emydex database however will be hosted on the Microsoft Azure “cloud platform” this platform is constantly being updated by Microsoft in terms of both hardware and software. Back up is also inbuilt into the Azure package. From a support point of view, Emydex technicians are dealing with one standard database. Software deployment of both shop floor and office applications is achieved simply by selecting a hyperlink which automatically downloads and installs the application programs.

Emydex Apps!

Not quite the same as those thousands of little programs that can be down loaded to your smart phone or tablet but following the same idea. Emydex will be launching a sequence of standard shop floor applications for collecting data, printing labels and reports for commonly used applications in the food industry.

Each application will have a shop floor component and a corresponding back office component. Both components will connect to the Emydex on Demand database running in the cloud. Developed using the combined 130 years of food industry experience inherent in the Emydex design team, the standard apps will have a degree of built in configurability enabling them to meet the majority of users requirements.

Initial apps being developed are:

  • Outer Case Marking Station
  • Individual Pack Labelling Station
  • Recipe Formulation Station
  • Intake Station
  • Dispatch Station
  • Into/Out of Process Station

If a user invests in more than one application they will share the same database, enabling Emydex standard client applications for reporting on Process, Yields and Stocks.

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Emydex Livestock Payment System

All three flavours of the Emydex multi-species livestock payments system are now live and running in abattoirs spread across Ireland and the UK.

Emydex’s Beef payments system is live in Liffey Meat’s plant in Ballinasloe, as well as Euro Farm Foods in Ireland. The Lamb payments system is live in Scotlamb (Vivers) in Scotland and the Emydex Pig payments system in Dawn Pork and Bacon in Ireland. Since being installed at these plants the system is being considered by a number of plants in the UK and Ireland, and even further afield in mainland Europe and Africa via our re-seller network.

Integration with other Emydex Kill Line Components

The payments system integrates with Emydex’s livestock booking component in order to ensure that any special prices applied at the time of booking are used for the payments. If no special prices are used then the system defaults to a base price per species/category.

When integrated to the payments system the booking component is able to retrieve the previous historical prices paid to a producer and the previous quality of animals received. This is for assistance when special prices need to be negotiated.

Whilst the main kill data is read from the Emydex carcass classification component, the payment system is in effect a stand-alone module, and whilst integration with other Emydex kill line components offers advantages, they are not compulsory. The Emydex payments system is capable of integration with any supplier’s kill line systems.

Settlement Schemes

The payment system itself is highly configurable. The method of calculating the amount to be paid for each carcass is called a ‘settlement schedule’. Whilst it would be simplest to administer if there was a single settlement schedule for all producers, this is often not possible. The system therefore allows any number of settlement schemes to be created and allocated against producers/agents.

Each settlement scheme can be made up of any number of elements. All schemes will start with a default base price/kg for each category of livestock being killed. In its simplest form this price is used to calculate the initial value of the carcass. Base prices can be over-written with prices agreed at time of booking, and/or at time of payment.

There are then a set of adjustment tables that are applied sequentially to the carcass to arrive at the final purchase price. Whilst these adjustments are normally always deductions, the Emydex system will allow bonuses to be paid for specific conditions.

Typical Adjustment tables would be:

Weight range table – with flat rate value paid above specific weights
Eurograde table – with adjustments based upon a grid of confirmation and fat class
Fault table – with adjustments based upon specific fault conditions
Quality table – with adjustments based upon the producers quality status

The Emydex system enables the user to set up as many adjustment tables as required using any parameter either captured in the system or recalled from the database.

The system has now calculated the individual value of each animal and the gross value of the lot. There are now a set of deductions that need to be applied to the gross value.

Again these deductions are created by the user. A specific set of deductions is defined for each settlement scheme.

Typical deductions (which can be specified as per kg or per head) include Haulage, Industry Levies, Veterinary Levies and Clipping Charges.

Pricing Screen:

Emydex Payments screen

Report Printing

Dependent upon the species/producer, there may be a requirement for the remittance advice note to show individual animals or grouped animals (e.g. by weight range or grade range). The system can be set to print either or both.

If the user requires it, the remittance advice note and cheque can be incorporated into the same document.

Reports are also available for any deductions specified.

Financial Integration

The Emydex payment system has the functionality to be operated in two modes.

Financial System Prints Cheques

In the first mode Emydex simply prints remittance advice notes and a list of all individual lot payments. This list is also available as a file for export into the user’s financial system for invoicing.

In the case of deductions, an invoice is normally received from the service provider, the Emydex deductions reports can be used to cross check the invoice amounts.

Emydex Prints Cheques

In this scenario the cheque is printed by the Emydex system (either attached to remittance advice note or on separate stationary). The Emydex system will also then print invoice lists with cheque numbers. This list is also available as a file for export into the user’s financial system.

Summary

The Emydex Livestock Payments System eliminates calculation errors by integrating the payment calculation system with the livestock classification system. It is a real time system that enables the payment calculation to be made as soon as a lot has been processed, significantly improving the efficiency of the payments office.

Historical data analysis enables processors detailed views of producer’s deliveries to the plant, such information can be shared with producers to the benefit of both parties.

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Oliver Carty testimonial video

Emydex case study with Oliver Carty, a Pork and Bacon producer based in Athlone, Ireland. The video describes how Oliver Carty use Emydex's Production Management software throughout their 2 further processing factories from door to door, covering Intake, Box packing, Order Picking (Scanning) and Dispatch.

The video also shows Oliver Carty’s use of Emydex’s back-office Client software to report on their Stocks, Yields and food Chain Traceability.

 

Oliver Carty Video

 

Emydex staff 2014
2014 Emydex Team

Highlight Comments on project

We wanted a model that worked completely from backdoor through to dispatch, a system that could give us data and ease of use was of key importance to us."
Justin Lennon, Key Account Manager, Oliver Carty

"We work on any hardware therefore we were able to
re-use their existing hardware which saved them
a lot of cost.

From our perspective, Oliver Carty is a very progressive and innovative food processing company. We recognise their willingness to invest in technologies solutions to give them accurate reporting on their metrics that drive their business. So I view the relationship as a partnership rather than a traditional customer supplier relationship."

Dave McMahon, CEO, Emydex

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Green Farm Foods live with Emydex

Since its foundation in 1991, Green Farm Foods have continuously expanded over the past two decades to meet growing demand for their food products. Today the company employs just over 100 people at a 4,000 sq. metre facility in Rathowen, Co. Westmeath in Ireland. Green Farm Foods specialise in the production of premium-cooked consumer foods for companies like Supervalu, Centra, Dunnes Stores, Tesco, Londis, Spar and Superquinn in Ireland.

Green Farm Foods growth plans included a requirement to utilise the latest technologies to allow for increased production capacity, higher standards and more innovative products. To help deliver this goal, Green Farm Foods contacted Emydex in April 2012 with a view to installing an Emydex Production Management system to capture, manage and report on production data across the plant from door to door.

Two project phases included replacing their AMPS warehousing intake and dispatch system in Phase 1 and later replacing their existing Scanvaegt Packing stations in Phase 2. The Emydex system is also integrated to their Pegasus Opera Financial System to synchronise master data files such as product, suppliers, customers, customer pricing and labelling, as well as to receive notification of all POs for pending goods to be received. Sales orders are currently keyed directly into the Emydex system.

“Similar to our other customers, Green Farm Foods had a few specific requirements we hadn’t previously built, that did not exist in our standard Packing and Processing module” said David McMahon, Emydex CEO. The Emydex Packing module incorporated two standard packing modules that include (1) box weighing and labelling followed by containerising/labelling at pallet level and (2) pack weighing and labelling followed by containerising at box level. Green Farm Foods had requirement for a 3rd variation of packing whereby it would be possible to pack multiple-products into a box, followed by box labelling. “Given the inherent flexibility of the Emydex system, we were able to code the changes for Green Farm Foods into their customer specific layer of business logic. Should other customers also look for similar functionality in the future, this feature may well end up as a standard feature of our Emydex Packing & Processing Module but this decision will very much depend on customer demand” added McMahon.

Another difference was that Emydex Dry Goods Intake functionality traditionally works over handheld scanners, whereas Bulk Intake took place over a fixed point terminal and scales. Green Farm Foods had a requirement to Intake both Dry and Bulk Goods on fixed point terminals, so again this was customised to suit their requirements exactly. “At this stage after 8 years of continuous product development, refinement and enhancement we pretty much have everything that any food processing customer could wish to look for, but if we don’t we can develop it quickly and easily given the flexible nature of the technology platform the Emydex system is built on”.

Commenting on the final phase of the project going live in August 2012, Robert Patton, Financial Controller with Green Farm Foods said “with Emydex we were able to replace our previous systems with minimal fuss and down-time, and with little requirement for operator retraining. Given Emydex is an open system we were able to reuse much of our existing hardware and were able to minimise the need to purchase any new hardware.”

“Green Farm Foods now have a fully functioning production management software system that covers all aspects of our production process within a single system. With Emydex we can create any number of warehouses and locations ourselves to track and control stock. We can Intake bulk, dry goods and packaging stock, we can build, break-down and rebuild pallets as required, we can scan stock from each and every stock location to any other location, we can issue To Production, issue From Production, Write-off and Dispatch stock. On the reporting side we now have the ability to run live Yield reports across various stages of our production process, in addition to the entire plant. Emydex were also able to implement their out-of-the-box stock reconciliation system without any fuss or difficulty”.

For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

Request a Demo