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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

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Interfrigo Coldstore system enhanced with Food Allergen controls

Interfrigo Brand

Interfrigo is the largest independent cold store in Northern Ireland, operating a 136,000 sq ft state-of-the-art cold store with storage capacity for 20,000 pallets. The Interfrigo coldstore provides 3rd party cold storage for a number of local and international food producers including many of Emydex’s food processing customers. Interfrigo looked to Emydex to replace their existing warehousing system back in early 2011.

“As we manage stock on behalf of some large Food Processing companies who also operate Emydex’s Production Management systems in their factories, it made sense for Interfrigo to replace our existing legacy WMS with Emydex’s Warehouse Management Software system” explains Brendan McAlonan, Interfrigo’s Operations Manager. “The Emydex warehousing system provides Interfrigo with all the usual capabilities you would expect to find in a full-blown Warehousing system, but in addition it provides us with real-time electronic links to our customers who are also using Emydex’s factory floor system. The benefit of this is the ability to manage stock transfers and sales order picking requests instantly and accurately”.

Using Emydex’s ‘Intersite-transfers’ feature our customers also running Emydex are able to dispatch and trace shipments into and out of the Interfrigo Cold Store seamlessly. On the Interfrigo side, goods are verified once received, put-away, picked and dispatched all via Emydex, with the ability to break-down and rebuild pallets to fulfill sales orders as required. Emydex were able to enhance their system to also run a version of Emydex on truck-mounted terminals in all our fork-lifts.” The Emydex system is stable and reliable, easy to use, and totally flexible to allow us to create new forms or reports required by the business without any great hassle” added McAlonan.

Following on from the original implementation, Legislative and Customer driven demands have been introduced requiring the management and reporting of food allergens contained within any food products stored in the Cold Storage facilities. Emydex have further extended their warehousing system to capture and report on the details of any specific allergens contained within every product stored on behalf of Interfrigo customers.

Using Emydex, Interfrigo now electronically record details as to which food products contain allergens such as milk, eggs, wheat, peanuts, shellfish and soybeans etc. whether in powder, liquid or solid form. Once Allergen details have been captured and recorded electronically in Emydex, this allows Interfrigo to review options around storage and put-away to ensure foods containing certain Allergens are stored separately from those without. It also means dispensing with and manual paper-based food allergen control systems and allows for instant and accurate reporting on the food allergen status for all food stocks stored within the cold stores.
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Oliver Carty opt for an Emydex and NAV blended software solution

Oliver Carty was set up in 1960 by Oliver Carty and is now run by his son Ted Carty. Located in Athlone, Co. Roscommon in Ireland, Oliver Carty produce a range of value add retail products for the majority of Ireland’s leading retailers. They are the biggest producer of bacon and rashers in Ireland, and have won numerous awards for their products including Best Organic Meat Product, Super Valu’s Irish Food producer of the year (2011).

Oliver Carty contacted Emydex in early 2011 with a requirement to replace their existing Production Management Software systems supplied by a number of different software companies with a single system to manage their entire production process spread across their two factories. “We operated an amalgamation of three different systems which was extremely slow to use, and gave little in the way of data and reporting” Justin Lennon, Key Accounts manager with Oliver Carty explained. The original systems in place at Oliver Carty’s included an Intake system, a separate warehousing dispatch system and a Scanvaegt system comprising multiple end-of-line box labelling stations.

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

In phase one Emydex’s Warehouse Management system was implemented running in parallel with their existing Intermec dispatch system. After a few days of successful parallel running the Intermec system was switched off. The system was then extended to cover the intake of raw materials and dry goods; together with dry goods and finished goods stock control which allowed the existing Intake system to be removed. The Emydex Warehousing system was integrated to their existing Scanvaegt packing stations to retrieve packing transaction data, as well as interfaced to their in-house financial system to retrieve sales orders, purchase orders as well as master data files such as products, customers, suppliers and depots etc.

Phase 2 of the Emydex implementation covered the replacement of Oliver Carty’s Scanvaegt system with Emydex packing station software, adding new production management functionality including line yield reporting and packing against production orders. “When dealing with the retail sector it is vitally important to be able to give our customers the information they are looking for and to do so quickly. Since we moved to Emydex we have been able to provide an array of information to ourselves and our customers in a matter of seconds. Also the time taken to scan an order has halved” said Justin Lennon

Now that the Emydex implementation has bedded in, Oliver Carty have opted to replace their existing financial system with Microsoft Dynamics NAV financials using Emydex’s recently developed bridging software to NAV (called a NAV granule) built in conjunction with Microsoft NAV gold partner company, Simply Dynamics. “The benefits of implementing NAV with Emydex is NAV can handle variable/catch weights better than most other financial packages on the market, and leaves Oliver Carty scope to extend their NAV system into other areas of the business such as CRM for example”, said David McMahon, CEO with Emydex.
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Labelling for Traceability

“Traceability is the cornerstone of any production management system and inevitably, labelling is the predominant method of maintaining traceability at various stages of operation. If product can be traced from farm to finished goods dispatch, then all of the data will be in place to produce whatever management information is required”, says Peter Kettel, Emydex Technology’s UK general manager.

“In the abattoir Emydex has systems producing labels for carcass, hides, heads, offal and tissue samples.”

Specialist weighing and printing techniques, together with purpose designed line configurations, are required for high-speed lamb lines. We’re able to print a bar-coded carcass tag label with full traceability every 4.5 seconds using our food processing software solution. Most beef plants will cut sides in a marshalling area, with some cuts going into boning and some dispatched as either hanging cuts or removed in jumbo containers.

Our carcass splitting engine automatically allocates traceability labels for all removed or hanging cuts. This is done via a hand- held Wi-Fi bar axle scanning terminal, with no need to re-weigh the cuts to produce the new labels.”

Throughout the production operation, there are normally weighing stations at critical control points. These are usually connected to industrial PC units and label printers, enabling software systems to control and monitor production.

Kettel says: ‘Relatively basic software packages will just record what product has been weighed into and out of production departments, using this data to produce yield reports. Advanced Emydex systems enable production to be planned and controlled. Only meat with the correct attributes of quality status, grade, country of origin and so on is allowed to be input into particular production batches. Cuts from individual carcass can be traced throughout he deboning process with purposely designed operating procedures.’

 

Extract from story originally published in Meat Trades Journal January 2012

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Updated Post Mortem QC Station Developed

This application was developed so that it could be run on either fixed position industrial PC stations or mobile devices (MDA). It was developed in response to a need to eliminate poorly presented carcasses.

The carcasses arrive at the inspection point in sequence. The QC operator can enter a fault type and the system will give the opportunity to select the part of the carcass where the fault is present. Any number of faults can be registered against each carcass. After a pre-defined number of instances of the same fault a supervisor is informed allowing corrective action to be taken and recorded.

All fault history is recorded.

Please note that this is intended for use by in plant QC. It is not intended as a veterinary inspection station; however it would be fairly simple for a similar application to be configured for use by the veterinarians.

 

 

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Liffey Meats opt for Emydex Kill line system

Liffey Meats Branding

In November 2011, Liffey meats started a new chapter in the history of Ballinasloe by processing the first cattle in their new state of the art meat factory in the town. This Emydex Beef kill line system currently incorporates Lairage booking, Sequencing and Grading terminals as well an offal packing station, Carcass dispatch station and a Beef Payments system with links to Liffey Meats flagship processing plant in Ballyjamesduff. The Mallon family who own and operate Liffey Meats, have three state of the art processing plants located in Cavan and Carlow and Galway Ireland. An Emydex implementation team deployed their kill line system from green-light to go-live within 10 days starting from scratch.

Commenting on the roll-out, Derek McDermott, Financial Controller with the Liffey Meats group said “I was impressed to see how quickly the Emdyex team were able to deploy their kill line traceability system into our new slaughter plant in Ballinasloe without having previous worked with the Liffey Meat’s group. Their kill line and payments systems went live without incident, and have been functioning stably ever since. We initially opted to install Emydex’s standard beef kill line system, but soon after go-live realised there were many business specific reports as well as specific system customisations required to match our existing business processes. Again the Emydex team were able to code these requirements up for us without hassle in a short space of time. It’s early days for Liffey Meats as an Emydex customer, but so far, so good. Their support structures are solid also.”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO said “it’s rewarding to see that after 5 years of product design and development, Emydex today have a full suite of robust and stable software systems that can be installed into different working environments with the minimum of effort and fuss. Well done to all those who worked on the Ballinasloe rollout Algis, Carl and especially to Daniel, our technical delivery manager for going the extra mile.”

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