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Dawn Pork & Bacon, 17 years on Emydex and counting

Dawn Pork & Bacon is one of Ireland’s leading Pork producers, operating out of Grannagh, Co Waterford in Ireland. May 2023 will see the 17th year Anniversary since Emydex first started working with Dawn Pork & Bacon, in 2006.

Emydex was founded in April 2004, so Dawn P&B was one of the very first customers to go live with an Emydex software system to manage, control and report on all their production, stocks, yields, and traceability requirements.

Continuous Improvements

Initially launched on Emydex Version 3 of the application, the system has been upgraded on a number of occasions to keep the software solution in check with the latest technical developments released by Emydex in both the core system, as well as the various industry modules in use. Industry modules operated by Dawn P&B cover their entire factory floor processes, door-to-door including pig kill line and payments, carcass stock management, into-boning, boning hall management, box packing and palletizing, sales order picking, and dispatch.

In 2009 the system was extended to add an Emydex weighbridge system for Dawn to manage truck deliveries to the plant used to verify dispatch weights against weights at the bridge, eliminating potentially costly mistakes.

24/7 Support

Alan Doocey, Dawn Pork & Bacon’s IT Manager at the time later relocated with his family to Australia, eventually ending up working for Emydex Australia, where he still works today on the Emydex Australia customer support team. Alan provides real-time technical helpdesk support to Emydex customers in Australia and New Zealand, as well as other Emydex customers around the globe who signed up to a 24x7x365 support agreement. The 24x7 team is made up of support engineers like Alan in Brisbane, in addition, to support staff in New Zealand, Canada, and Dublin.

Commenting on the successful working relationship between both companies over such a long tenure, Billy Leslie, Financial controller with Dawn Pork & Bacon said

We in Dawn Pork & Bacon are delighted to celebrate a very successful partnership of 17 years with Emydex in 2023. The Emydex suite of software plays an integral part in the day-to-day running of our business. The system is very user-friendly allowing production staff to fully engage with it. As a result, the information the system produces is extremely reliable enabling us to maintain tight control of our yields, stock management, and our supply chain.

We look forward to continuing our partnership with Emydex in the future. A future that will include increased regulatory control and sustainability reporting challenges within the Agri-Business sector. In partnership with Emydex, we are confident that these challenges can be overcome.

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

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Emydex Update from Down Under

Feb 2023

2023 is shaping up to be a busy year for Emydex in this part of the world (Australasia), with the roll-out of Beef & Pork processing systems in New Zealand, several animal payments systems, as well as a first-time implementation of an export sales management system for a large feed lotting customer in Australia

 

Beef Processing System

Emydex Team NZ is working with one of our group beef processing customers to roll out their ‘group standard’ Emydex slaughter floor solution, to all their other beef plants in New Zealand over the next nine months. In addition, a second Emydex team is busy commissioning an Emydex solution for their first secondary butchery (boning) room. To meet this ambitious target, our 15-person strong Emydex team working in New Zealand and Australia will support both projects.

Animal Payments System

Also, in the first quarter of this year, another Emydex meat processor in New Zealand will go live with an Emydex Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for their pork processing plant, as well as commission our newly updated Central Animal Payments System (CAPS). Being multi-species in its design, it will be possible to quickly roll out this Payments system to the other divisions within the company once the pork plant goes live.

Export Sales Management System

Crossing the Tasman Sea, in Australia Emydex will commission a new Export Sales Management and Central Animal Payments System (CAPS) for beef payments for a new Emydex customer in Queensland, which is Australia’s largest privately-owned beef cattle lot feeding company.  This new customer does not own any processing facilities directly, so their entire marketing and inventory management system is managed via data sent from third-party toll processors and logistics companies. The company expects to see a marked improvement in the efficiency of sales activities as well as providing visibility and traceability of their inventory from production plant to customer. Emydex will provide a strong and flexible platform to support the raid growth planned for this year.

Emerging Trends

Emydex are seeing more integration of labour-saving systems with the surfacing of data not traditionally made available to support the production staff processes. This includes data from items such as refrigeration, X-ray carcase grading systems, automated storage and retrieval units, stunning data on the kill floor, IoT devices etc. All of this is collected via a module known as the Data Communications Interface (DCI) module in the Emydex MES, and is integrated and used to support the manufacturing process and is surfaced by the MES via the inbuilt Emydex Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tool. This functionality supports the implementation of Industry 4.0 to provide a ‘whole of life’ view of the production process and to identify efficiencies and compliance issues within the production systems.

CEO Visit

Emydex Australasia is delighted to welcome our group CEO, David McMahon, back to these shores after an absence of several years due to Covid. Dave will be visiting existing customers in Western Australia, Victoria, NSW, and Queensland as well as North and South islands in New Zealand. In addition, meeting up with Emydex staff dotted across both countries, many working remotely from home, hired during the pandemic. Dave is also scheduled to meet several new companies interested in learning more about Emydex. If any readers of this newsletter are interested in learning more about Emydex or even catching up on some of the new directions and processes that are emerging in Europe, we would be more than happy to arrange a meeting whilst he is here. Please reach out to [email protected]. 

Lamb Processing System

As the year progresses, another Emydex customer will be moving into the implementation phase of their Emydex lamb processing system, rolling out to their two Australian-based sheep processing plants in WA and NSW. Other Emydex customers will continue to implement new modules to support their existing processes whether they be web portals for farmer livestock bookings and feedback, automated chiller sortation, integration to automated labelling systems or the integration of order and stock management functions in Emydex to automated storage and retrieval systems. All these projects will deliver considerable labour savings, which considering the current labour shortages in the industry, will bring rapid payback and efficiencies to those who are embarked upon these projects.

For any information on any of the projects outlined above, please email [email protected] for more information.

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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 2016, 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 2018.

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, South Africa, and Australia.

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, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or North American offices

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Farmer Bookings & Feedback via Livestock Portal

Farmer Bookings & Feedback via Livestock Portal

A new web-based appointment booking and feedback system, reduces paperwork, facilitates easier appointments, and provides transparent feedback to producers and farmers in real-time and accurately

Feb 2022

The supply of livestock from the producer to the meat processor is underpinned by the consistent supply of livestock of the correct quality, correct inspection and optimal grading of these animals while processing in meat processing factories. This is applicable to Beef, Lamb and Pork/hog producers and processors. 

This relationship can now also be built-upon and strengthened with the use of a transparent data transfer from the processor back to the producers via a new Emdyex web-based appointment booking and feedback system. This is achieved via Emydex standard APIs that interact directly with Emydex factory floor MES Solutions running on Kill lines in Abattoirs and Slaughterhouses around the world. 

 

Animal Health Feedback 

Farmers could have the ability to make bookings and appointments, receive Health feedback information, download their financial information, as well as receive their remittances digitally through the Portal, reducing unnecessary paper documentation and helping both sides work towards their sustainability goals.

To facilitate the seamless exchange of producer/Processor data, Emydex has developed a comprehensive suite of secure web APIs. These are designed to simplify the livestock supply from producer to processor and offer the ability to surface kill line and grade data about the supplied livestock back to the producer.

 

Farmer Appointments & Bookings

Authorised agents and suppliers can book appointments to supply their livestock to the processor directly using the API calls embedded in a web portal which can be run via a web browser on a desktop PC or mobile device. This makes the process of selling livestock to the processor far simpler than initiating a booking via other means, eliminating double handling of data and reducing the opportunity for errors in the process.

The Emydex Supplier WebAPI Module consists of several API endpoints that can be called to perform various operations, such as registering new suppliers and livestock delivery appointments directly within Emydex, providing details of any generated payments and retrieving relevant data collected on the Emydex kill line. 

 

Visibility of Grading & Quality Data

This can include the data from the Emydex veterinary inspection stations, grading data and if applicable data from chiller grading processes (MSA). The data retrieval from the kill line via the APIs can be performed at a per delivery or lot level or down to the individual sides of the carcasses forming part of a particular delivery or lot. This offers much greater visibility of the grading and quality data registered to each carcass by the processor and provides comprehensive feedback to the supplier on the condition of the livestock supplied to the factory. How each carcass was graded informs how each carcass was ultimately priced for payment. This can assist the supplier in improving the quality of supplied livestock to meet the producers’ requirements.

By combining the Emydex Kill Line, Central Animal Payments System and Livestock API modules in one wholistic solution, Beef, Lamb and Pork livestock suppliers and processors can achieve a higher level of digital integration when considering the supply of animals to the plant and also receiving performance feedback on the quality of supply and pricing calculations applied to the delivery.

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Emydex CEO Update – 2022 Review

Emydex CEO Update – 2022 Review

Looking back on 2022, last year continued with the trend of challenging global trade conditions with the War in Ukraine fuelling a global energy crisis and rapidly rising inflation.  Not much of a break in the weather post the Pandemic that overshadowed most of 2020 and 2021.

Despite these challenges, Emydex continued to grow and expand in 2022 with double-digit revenue growth over 2021.  The company continued to grow in our key overseas markets, with a team of over fifteen full-time employees now employed across our two subsidiary companies in Australia and New Zealand.

Project work continues at pace with our New Zealand customers, Silver Fern Farms, Wilson Hellaby, as well our newest customer in NZ, Open Ocean, an indigenous mussel processing factory in Opotiki, North Island.

Our Emydex team in Australia was boosted by the arrival of some highly experienced Emydex employees including Jeffrey Macer Wright (Emydex South Africa) as well as Carl Brennan (Emydex Ireland) who both permanently relocated with their families to Australia, to work out of our Emydex office, located in South Brisbane.

Jeffrey and the Emydex Australian team are busy working on system expansions and upgrades with several customers in Australia including Harvey Beef, Junee Lamb, as well as new customers Mort & Co and WAMMCO.

New product developments completed by Emydex Australia include a new Meat Messaging system, developed in conjunction with the Australian Meat Processor Corporation (AMPC).  This new system enables Emydex customers to electronically send a list of GS1 labeled carton records (for export shipments, including export certifications) to a centralised cloud storage system, which virtually eliminates the potential for rejection of cartons due to port mark errors or omissions.

The Emydex team in North America has also grown on foot of some significant new customer wins, including a large multi-plant poultry processor with over ten primal and further processing plants spread across Canada.

Back home in Ireland, the Irish team are also busy on several large customer upgrades to our latest Version 6 software, as well as New Product Developments including:

Android Scanning (XDA)

A new Android-based Emydex application running on handheld scanners used for Warehousing functions including Stock management, Issue to production, QC Hold, Containerising, Palletising, Sales Order picking and Dispatch.  Feedback from early adopter customers includes “I have been so impressed with the new Emydex XDA.  The speed at which it works is fantastic even with the database being in the cloud” Operating on Android devices means Emydex customers can source devices, from a wide range of manufacturers, at a lower cost compared to previous Windows mobile devices.

Central Animal Payments (CAPS)

A complete rewrite of our widely used Animal kill line payment system.  CAPS provides the core ‘engine’ which is used to not only generate payments to livestock suppliers but also to those other entities involved in supplying livestock such as buyers, agents, and transport companies.  In addition to generating payments, the system can produce accounts receivable invoices for service processing allowing suppliers to be paid.

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) Portal

A new web-based application that enables Emydex customers to manage their supplier audits over the web.  Suppliers securely log into an Emydex web portal to complete self-assessment questionnaires/assessments (SAQ), collect relevant documents, submit product specifications, and manage contacts.  The supply chain manager 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 a view all information submitted by the supplier.

Other new products in the Pipeline for 2023 include further development of our new Enterprise Management System (EMS), a corporate-level suite of software applications targeted specifically at maintaining data integrity, reducing data entry, and improving control across multi-plant businesses.

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

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Emydex CAPS off year with Livestock Payments System

Emydex CAPS off the year with a new Livestock Settlements System

For most Meat processors, the procurement of raw materials, especially Livestock, is by far the largest variable cost for the business to manage. Therefore, being able to ensure the Accurate andTimely payment for this stock is a key requirement. Many Meatprocessors choose to differentiate themselves from their competitors based on the speed and accuracy of payment to their suppliers. Emydex’s recently redeveloped Central Animal Payment System (CAPS) is designed to meet this requirement specifically, as well as to provide functionality that provides parameter-driven flexibility to meet all current and future requirements.

 

Calculating Animal Settlements

The key to the success of the system is the ability to design animal payment ‘methods’ that can be added to the system as a component to suit individual customer needs without modifying the existing system. This means that if there is a requirement for a new way of paying a supplier, whether it be based on a contract, supply volumes, average market process, or a complex grid-based system, these can be developed and ‘locked in’ to the existing system as a snapshot for later retrieval.

As standard, the Animal Payment System caters to multiple payment grids where any data from the kill floor or kill ‘lot’ (delivery) can be incorporated into multiple axes of a grid to generate a payment.

This might be a weight range and fat score or a meat marbling score and dentition range i.e. virtually any combination of data elements that can be measured as part of livestock processing.

Multiple grids can be used to accumulate values such as a supplementary ‘bonus’ value or to allow a record to pass to a second grid if the criteria for the first grid e.g. a carcass that is too heavy or old for the first payment grid. This ‘fall through’ process can be repeated until a grid that matches is finally found.

 

Cattle Payment Invoicing and Adjustments

The system is capable of producing recipient-created tax invoices (RCTI) for suppliers (farmers), third-party agents, commissioned livestock buyers, transport companies and service or contract kills (an accounts receivable transaction rather than the usual accounts payable).

User-defined adjustments, again using virtually any of the data in the system, can apply adjustments to this invoice to either deduct money for items such as carcass faults, levies, transport costs etc. or apply a rebate such as a ‘skin’ or hide credit. These can be applied automatically using pre-defined ‘settlement schemes’ (groups of adjustments) or added manually on a case-by-case basis.

 

Carcass Costings

As a carcass is produced, the system can calculate the cost for the carcass per kg (or lb) by running each carcass record through the various livestock settlement processes to generate the total cost, so not only is the cost of the purchase from the supplier included but also the cost of freight, commissions etc.

Costs that do not appear on any invoice such as a kill fee can also be included if required. This allows for carcasses to be costed before the payment is finalised so if the carcass is disposed of via a sale or boning process, the cost can be reported as part of the input to the process for accurate costings. Alternatively, carcass costs can be updated once the payment is finalised.

 

Animal Payment Reporting

Invoice and costing data can be updated to an in-house or 3rd party provider ERP or Financial system for payment with full audit trails and costing audits available in the CAPS system. Standard reports are available and data from the payment system can be surfaced using the in-built Emydex Business Intelligence (BI) tool.

Kill data can be from Emydex kill floor systems or up-uploaded from multiple sources and sites to allow for a centralized system for consolidated processing and reporting.

 

Centralised Payments catering for large Enterprises

Given the flexibility and extensibility of the system, current and future needs can easily be met with an ‘out of the box’ system. Once configured the system can generate payments, email all parties involved and update costs and financial systems at the push of a button. Payment processes that would traditionally take hours can be streamlined and the labour requirements significantly reduced.

Accurate costings allow for true profitability costing as the input costs to sales and further processing are readily available.

With the ability to run as a centralised process taking data from many sources, both large enterprises to single site operations can all gain tremendous advantages from the new system.

 

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

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