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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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Emydex CEO Update – 2022 Review

Emydex CEO Update – 2022 Review

Looking back on 2022, this year continues 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 continues to grow and expand in 2022 with half year results delivering double digit revenue growth over 2021.  The company continues 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 read story, Wilson Hellaby, as well our newest customer in NZ, Open Ocean, an indigenous mussel processing factory in Opotiki, North Island read story.

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, Wodonga, 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 labelled carton records (for export shipments, including export certifications) to a centralised cloud storage system, that virtually eliminates the potential for rejection of cartons due to port mark errors or omissions read story.

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 read story

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. Read Story

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 read story

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 Read Story

Other new products in the Pipeline for 2023 includes 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 read story

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

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Emydex CEO Update

A note from Emydex CEO, David McMahon

After the year of uncertainty, travel restrictions and lockdowns that was 2020, this year 2021 has seen a gradual return to normality, albeit with the markets we serve being in different stages of recovery, with Europe ahead of our colleagues in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand in terms of numbers vaccinated.

The Emydex country teams, still mainly working from home, are busy working on a number of large customer projects. These include Emydex V5 system upgrades for some of our larger multi-plant customers in Ireland, as well as continuing to build ‘group standard solutions for some of our newer multi-site processors in Europe, Canada as well as New Zealand

Throughout 2021, Emydex has continued to solidify its position as a global provider of MES solutions by building out our people and bases in the further stretches of the world including New Zealand and in North America, where new customers and new employees have been added to both Emydex companies established at the end of 2020

On the Product Development front, our software has evolved from our traditional 3-tiered software stack comprising the core platform, software modules and business logic, to add two new layers of software.

Our new Automation layer includes a suite of software modules such as the DCI (Data Communications Interface) that enables Emydex software to connect to factory floor automated machines and robots via standard protocols (OPC) as well as a new Simulator module that enables our customers to conduct scenario planning, as well as to test Emydex software in advance of the installation of factory floor machinery and to train operators in advance of go-live

Our new EMS layer of software developed for our enterprise-level multi-site processing customers, includes software modules such as Master Data Management, Emydex BI, EMS Exchange, Centralised Reporting as well as App Deployment, a suite of software applications designed to facilitate the central creation and dissemination of data files from group HQ to remote plants, as well as consolidated analysis and reporting.

Finally, our technology mix has expanded beyond our traditional windows desktop applications running on-premise, to complement these with new web-based applications (Blazor) as well as Android applications (Xamarin) such as our new XDA for handheld scanning applications, a replacement for our legacy SDA application running on the end-of-life windows mobile operating system.

Looking to the future, Emydex plans to continue to grow our teams of people in Ireland, North America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as form new strategic partnerships with global providers of Industrial equipment, ERP integrators and MES consultancy firms with specialist knowledge of the workings of the meat, fish and food processing industries.

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

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Emydex expands in the Land of the Long White Cloud

Emydex’s international reach has extended beyond its base in Brisbane Australia setup in 2016, to the Land of the Long White Cloud or Aotearoa, the Maori name for New Zealand.

 

Incorporated in November 2020, Emdyex New Zealand today includes a headcount of six full-time employees, currently all working remotely from home during the pandemic, although this likely to continue beyond Covid given the employees are spread over the four corners of the two Islands.

Emydex’s Team New Zealand, is a cross-functional team, with in-country expertise to service and support all our local NZ customers that currently includes Silver Fern Farms, with its head-quarters in Dunedin, South Island, as well as Wilson Hellaby with multiple processing plants operating in the North Island. Other new customer signings are also in the mix, some in other industries outside of beef, lamb and pork processing but too early to announce at this time of writing.

The Emdyex New Zealand team is lead by Hermien van den Berg, originally from South Africa, who has over 10 years of Project Management experience in leading project teams throughout the project lifecycle. Hermien is supported by a team five technical resources working on development, implementation and support for our New Zealand customers including: 

Vadim Shegay – Vadim has more than 15 years experience in software development and has considerable experience in C#, SQL, Web API. MCP SQL programming. Vadim joined Emydex New Zealand in January 2021 as Senior Solutions Engineer.

Wayne McRae - Dr. Wayne McRae graduated with a PhD in physics from Otago University, New Zealand in 2000. He joined Emydex Technology in 2021 as a Solutions Engineer, building on his previous experience with C#, Azure services, and SQL

Sian Larcombe - Sian has 10 years experience as a .Net software developer, and has worked across various sectors in the NZ technology industry. She has a bachelor’s in information technology from Whitireia Polytechnic.

 

Kern Carboni - Kern has 25 years of experience in Information Technology throughout various industries worldwide, including several years within the meat processing industry in New Zealand. Kern joined Emydex Technology in 2021 as a Senior Solutions Engineer with experience in C#, Azure services and SQL development. 

Carne de Vreede - Carne has 10 years extensive experience working in the red meat industry in various roles including boning room laborer, boning room knife-hand, boning room administrator as well as later roles including systems support and systems analyst. Carne is currently studying a Bachelor of Computer Science degree in the University of Auckland with the goal of becoming a Software Engineer on the Emdyex systems development team. He is currently providing systems testing & Support to Emydex’s customers in both New Zealand as well as Australia

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

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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.

Contact Sales in any of our Dublin, Brisbane, South Africa or Toronto offices

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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.

Contact Sales in any of our Dublin, Brisbane, South Africa or Toronto offices

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