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Emydex 20 years – Forresters Chicken

Forresters Chicken

Forresters Chicken

Value Added Poultry Processor
1 plant in Cheshire, England

Emydex customer from 2014 – 2024 (10 years)

“Forresters began its collaboration with Emydex in 2014, marking a decade of successful partnership. Throughout this period, our business has undergone substantial growth, solidifying its position as one of the leading poultry processing companies in the UK. I wish to express my sincere appreciation for the pivotal role played by Emydex in contributing to this remarkable journey.​

In every new project and challenge, the Emydex team consistently offered invaluable support, leveraging their expertise to ensure the successful achievement of our goals. Embracing technological advancements, Emydex has continuously enhanced our systems, exemplified by the seamless integration of vision and barcoding systems into their software.​

Dave and his team have consistently demonstrated the utmost professionalism in all our interactions. Looking forward, I eagerly anticipate the sustained success of this partnership as we navigate into the era of artificial intelligence. I am confident that the forthcoming years will witness even more successful collaboration between Forresters and Emydex.”

Forresters

ex-20yr-forresters

John Acornly
Finance Director
Forresters Sales Ltd

About FORRESTERS CHICKEN

Established in 1972 and based in Cheshire, Forresters is one of the largest suppliers of cooked, raw and coated poultry in the United Kingdom. The company supplies retailers, food services, pub retailers, manufacturers and catering butchers with a variety of frozen and chilled branded and own label chicken products.

If you want to learn more – contact Emydex in any of our global market offices in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or North America

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Forresters Chicken Celebrates a Decade of Quality Management with Emydex

Over the past ten years, Forresters Chicken has leveraged Emydex's Quality Management system to enhance accuracy, reduce human error, gain real-time insights into quality data, and improve traceability. This collaboration has significantly transformed Forresters Chicken's operations, ensuring the highest standards of quality and efficiency in their processes.

Meet the Client

Established in 1972, Forresters is one of the largest suppliers of cooked, raw, and coated poultry in the United Kingdom. Based in Cheshire, the company provides retailers, food services, pub retailers, manufacturers, and catering butchers with frozen, chilled branded, and own-label chicken products. To maintain its reputation for high-quality standards, Forresters set out to enhance its quality management processes.

The Opportunity

With a growing client base and increasing production demands, Forresters required a more streamlined and robust approach to quality management. Existing manual quality checks were resource-intensive and prone to human error, especially as production volumes rose. Furthermore, limited real-time access to quality data hindered swift decision-making and posed challenges in meeting regulatory standards.

Forresters needed a comprehensive Quality Management System (QMS) that could automate quality workflows, provide real-time data, and integrate with their ERP system for seamless traceability and compliance tracking. Forresters had been operating an Emydex factory floor MES (Manufacturing Execution System) for production control, yield management and traceability reporting for many years, so it was a straightforward decision to extend our Emydex software footprint to include all of our Quality, Compliance and Food Safety Management processes.

What We Did

Working closely with Forrester’s management, our team worked with Emydex to develop and implement a customised QMS solution that aligned with Forrester's operational goals. The implementation process was structured in two main phases:

1. Phase One - Digitalising Quality Checks
Forresters began by introducing automated digital checklists across the production floor, replacing paper logs and allowing quality checks to be completed via tablets at each workstation. Data is now collected on tablets running the Emydex Quality system in real-time, and any deviations from standards trigger instant alerts, allowing issues to be addressed immediately.

2. Phase Two - Comprehensive Quality Dashboard
In the next phase, Forresters deployed an Emydex quality system dashboard for management and supervisors, providing a centralised view of quality metrics across production. The dashboard consolidates data on batch compliance, audit trails, incident reporting, and corrective actions. Fully integrated with Forrester's ERP system, it links directly to purchasing and inventory data, ensuring traceability from raw materials to finished products.

3. Automated Audit and Compliance Reporting
A key feature of the Emydex EQMS is its automated compliance reporting. The system generates real-time, auditable compliance reports accessible from any device, dramatically reducing the time required for internal and external audits. Issues are flagged and assigned for resolution, enhancing accountability across departments.

The Results

Since implementing the Emydex Quality Management system, Forresters has significantly improved operational efficiency and quality compliance.

Enhanced Accuracy and Reduced Human Error: Automated digital checklists have replaced manual entries, reduced errors and ensured consistency in quality checks across all lines.

Real-Time Quality Insights: Managers and supervisors can now view quality metrics instantly, enabling quick decision-making and proactive quality control.

Efficient Compliance Audits: Compliance reporting, which previously required days of preparation, is now generated instantly by Emydex, saving time and resources. Audit readiness has also improved, as records are automatically archived and easily accessible.

Improved Traceability: The QMS enables complete traceability from raw material intake to finished product distribution, facilitating stock rotation and maintaining quality at every stage.

Feedback from Key Stakeholders

Dwayne Chin, Head of Technical at Forresters, noted, “The Emydex QMS has been transformative for our business. Our team no longer spends hours sorting through paper logs; we can spot and address issues immediately. Compliance reporting that once took days is now ready in minutes, giving us more control over quality and peace of mind.”

John Acornley, Finance Director, added, “With the Emydex Quality system in place, Forresters have significantly reduced errors and improved our response times. The Emydex automated alerts keep our team informed, and the dashboard makes it easy to stay on top of production quality. It’s been a huge upgrade.”

Summary

The Emydex Quality Management System implemented at Forresters has streamlined operations and reinforced its commitment to delivering high-quality products to its clients. By enhancing workflows, improving traceability, and enabling instant access to quality data, the QMS has empowered Forresters to meet regulatory standards and confidently scale its operations.

Don't wait! Embrace the future of quality management with Emydex's Electronic Quality Management Software (EQMS).

If you want to learn more – contact Emydex in any of our global market offices in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or North America

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Ensuring Quality & Compliance Across Four Continents

Emydex recently completed the upgrade of its Electronic Quality Management System (EQMS) to the latest Version 6 of the Emydex software suite.

 

A new product development project that started in 2018, working in conjunction with some of the largest food processors in Ireland and the UK who helped with system design, testing, and validation, the Electronic Quality Management System first went live with an Emydex customer, MeatCo Namibia, in late 2019.

Roll-on five years and the Quality Management System is today operating in over twenty meat, fish, and food processing plants around the world, including Emydex customers in Ireland, the UK, Canada, Namibia and South Africa.

One early-stage customer who adopted the Quality system and implemented it in their six Irish beef primal processing plants is currently extending their Emydex QMS roll-out to all their UK meat processing plants, with three UK plants live, another two currently undergoing commissioning, and a further seven to be completed by the end of 2023. In total over twenty plants will be running the Emydex quality management system, split across two country divisions.

This is very much at the core of the system i.e., the ability to centrally manage and control technical and quality data across multiple divisions, geographies, and plants, in a standard and consistent way.

At present, the system is being extended to offer capabilities for Emydex customers to perform Supplier Audits, and development is underway to offer data capture of Quality workflows, surveys, and audits, via a browser-based application running on Android devices, in addition to Windows OS devices.

Other new additions to the Quality system include product specifications & workflow planning.

 

Product Specifications

Product specifications functionality allows the product definition to be used for various checks based on the check being completed. For example, by completing a check on the dimensions of burgers being produced (Formax check) the workflow can be configured to compare operators’ entries against the product’s configured height, width, and weight. Similarly, if a packaging tare check is being completed, a separate workflow can compare the tare values being captured by the operator.

 

Workflow Planning

The workflow planning functionality was developed on the back of Emydex customer requirements to be able to manage preventative maintenance checks in more detail. This allows a super-user to schedule in more granularity based on timings and users who will complete the workflow.

The Emydex quality management system enables Meat, Fish, and Food processors to manage their Food Safety and Quality Assurance processes. HACCP and PCP can be managed using the system which supports monitoring within the factory, such as Critical Control Points (CCP) and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP’s). In addition, the application includes a document management system where key documents can be uploaded and version controlled, meaning that operators in the factory are always accessing the latest approved documents.

 

Commenting on the Quality system roll-out previously, John Coleman, Group Technical Manager with Dawn Meats said

The result is that resources have been freed up, saving cost. Less paperwork, collection is instant, no errors, less time, no printing, archive space has been freed up, we have instant and easy retrieval of documents – everything has improved and is more accurate.

We got what we wanted which is improved collection, visibility, and use of our data. That instant visibility means we have real-time situation reports. The tangible savings are obvious – less paper and less ink, for example. The less obvious savings are evident too – less time and effort, fewer mistakes and corrections, reduced hold-ups, etc. I can see if people are making the required quality checks and if they are making them at exactly the right times.

 

If you want to learn more – contact our Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, or North American offices

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Know your Suppliers – Introducing Emydex SRM

Emydex Supplier Relationship Management Portal

Managing the suppliers in your supply chain has become increasingly more challenging due to ever-changing legislation, as well as disruptions to the supply chain caused by COVID restrictions.

Food processors need a software system that enables them to interact, collaborate and manage their customers and suppliers in a fast, efficient, straightforward, easy-to-use manner

Without a single system to handle collaboration with such entities, food processors rely heavily on emails, spreadsheets, phone calls and other manual means to manage their customer and supplier relationships, which due to the complex nature of food processing and the supply chain for it to function, processors often can fail to meet the regulatory requirements set out by government bodies and customer demands.

Supply Chain Management Software

To combat these issues, in conjunction with a number of our Tier 1 leading customers, as well as extensive market research, Emydex recently released version 1 of our Supply Chain Management (SCM) suite of software – that is the Emdyex Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) portal. This web-based, cloud-hosted software application enables your suppliers to securely log into a web portal to complete self-assessment questionnaires/assessments (SAQ), collect relevant documents, submit product specifications and manage contacts.

The supply chain manager for meat, fish or food processors will be able to manage everything related to suppliers completing SAQs and managing their supplier’s approval status & risk rating. As well as this, they will be able to receive notifications and view all information & results submitted by the supplier.

Emydex Supplier Portal

The Supplier Relationship Management Portal is the first phase of the entire Supply Chain Management that will be developed and will assist Meat, Fish and food processors in managing their supply chains.

If you want to learn more – contact Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or North America offices

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Enterprise Management Software

A New Era In Food Enterprise Management Software Applications

Emydex’s new suite of Enterprise Management Software (EMS) applications are designed specifically for multi-faceted food processing companies, those which are mainly multi-plant operations, usually overseen by a group HQ plant. Typically, these plants are spread geographically across a country or several countries and would be large food processing organisations. 

It is difficult to maintain data integrity across these often-complex businesses, is often labour intensive and prone to human error with the duplication of information across multiple systems. 

Emydex Enterprise Management System (EMS)

Emydex’s answer to this problem is the Emydex Enterprise Management System (EMS) suite of software which comprises a series of web apps targeted specifically at maintaining data integrity, reducing data entry, and improving control across plants. 

Emydex Enterprise Management System

From a system architecture point of view, the EMS layer resides between the customer ERP system and the various operating plants.

The EMS layer of the Emydex software stack is made up of several web apps tailored toward solving these problems for multi-plant customers.

 

Business Intelligence (BI)

Emydex BI is the latest app of the Enterprise layer allowing customers to surface data to provide visual real-time and trending analytical dashboards. Sitting at the corporate level allows integration to multiple plants to surface data as well as other third-party systems such as ERP & financial systems.  Find out more here

 

Master Data Management (MDM)

Master Data Management (MDM) is designed to control data integrity to ensure it is consistent across all plants. The Master data management module allows customers to centrally manage master data such as products, label designs, kill line destinations as well as other required data.

This removes the effort needed by plant staff to replicate data into each instance of Emydex which instantly reduces the risk of human error. With EMS MDM, corporate users can centrally control all aspects of master data which creates consistency across the business. An example of this is that if a label design is managed centrally, the label will look identical, no matter the plant it was produced from, which from a customer's point of view can be critical. This can also reduce incorrect labelling which can cause product recalls and market rejections, impacting the business brand and reputation.

 

EMS App Deployment

This app empowers the Emydex customer's IT department to take control of deploying the Emydex applications out to the plants. This increases IT security and allows the IT department to pull updates into the business network to then choose when to deploy to the individual plants. This in turn allows the customer to be more self-sufficient in relation to updating plant's MES software outside of production.

 

EMS Exchange

EMS Exchange is Emydex’s newest approach to integration between the plants and third-party systems such as ERP systems and cold stores. It allows for the configuration of rules to route data from one system to other(s). This reduces the customisation required to integrate the Emydex applications into other third-party systems

 


Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS)

Emydex’s first Enterprise module was the Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) which allows customers to centrally control, capture, store and report on various quality & technical aspects of their operations.
Find out more here…

 

The Future of EMS

The Emydex new product development team are busy working on new apps and features to further extend and enhance our offerings, including additional EMS modules such as Centralised Product Specifications, Production Planning, Payments, Livestock Appointments and Yield Costing. 

Watch this space!

 

If you want to learn more – contact Ireland, Australia, South Africa or North America offices

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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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