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Emydex expands in Canada: a game changer for Food Traceability

Emydex expands in Canada: a game changer for Food Traceability

Customers

It has been a busy year of expansion for the Emydex Team in North America. We started deploying our solution to a prominent multi-plant poultry provider in the region, initiating with a Packing and Labelling Solution for their key facility in Waterloo, Ontario. We are eager to commence integration with their enterprise-wide ERP system and to launch enhanced features in Waterloo and additional sites.

In the Seafood sector, we've been collaborating with a leading seafood company in British Columbia for a few years now, focusing on tailored solutions for their distinct Roe Herring processing. At the same time, we are enhancing their utilization of our standard features across various fish species processing operations.

Our inaugural client in North America, a major pork processing company that has been with us since 2017, is planning to be extend their existing three production operations, to a fourth plant, a state-of-the-art Sow Processing Facility in Saskatchewan, with Emydex delivering the factory floor MES solution. This project brings unique hardware and software challenges, and we are thrilled to customize the Emydex system to meet their operational needs.

PEOPLE

Our Emydex team of people in Canada has been growing along with our business. This year we are pleased to welcome Franzreved Vendiola to the team, working out of Sakatchewan. Franzreved has been a valuable addition to the team, supporting our customers in British Columbia as well as Ontario. We also look forward to welcoming Alistair Walmsley, who recently joining our growing team in Canada, working from his home office in British Columbia.

The addition of Fransreved and Alastair means Emydex engineers are available to communicate and support our customers from East to West Coast North America, also well placed resources for our 24/7 global support coverage system, which leverages our staff in timezones around the world, including locations such as Auckland, Brisbane and Perth, as well as Dublin and Europe obviously.

BAADER

With the recent news of our strategic partnership with BAADER, headquartered in Germany, Emydex had the pleasure of joining some BAADER executives for customer visits in British Columbia, where we were able to introduce the partnership to many of our customers, some of whom are already customers of BAADER also. Soon after that successful trip we were pleased to host a visit from Mrs. Baader, CEO of BAADER Global, in our Canadian base area of Waterloo Ontario.

In the market we are seeing a lot of interest in Emydex's newly released Kill Line and Payment Modules. The process of managing a Meat Packer’s harvest floor has gotten much more complicated. Meat Packers must track and process different breeds, different raising methods (eg. Antibiotic Free, Organic, free-range, etc.). These additional tracking requirements are stressing the Meat Packers' existing Kill line and Payment Management System. Emydex provides a parameter driven Kill Line and Payment Management System, to allow Packers to migrate very quickly to a solution that allows them to be more efficient and manage the payment process.

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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Emydex Tour of Australia and New Zealand

A lot of ground was covered by Emydex in Australia and New Zealand over three weeks in February and March, visiting both customers and prospects in Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, and North & South Islands in New Zealand

 

It was great for Emydex CEO David McMahon to finally (post covid) meet and get to know all our fifteen hard-working Emydex employees working around Perth, Brisbane, Auckland, and Christchurch.

Week 1 of the trip centred around Emydex customer meetings in Western Australia (Harvey Beef, WAMMCO), Victoria (O’Connor Beef, Central Agri group), Wagga Wagga (Junee Lamb), finishing up in Sydney on Friday for a series of meetings with prospective customers. This gave Emydex CEO David McMahon and Emydex GM for Australasia, Jeffrey Macer-Wright, time on Saturday morning to take in some of the sights of Sydney via a running tour, before heading on to Auckland over the weekend.

 

A statue of Sir Thomas Mort in Sydney Harbour, founder of Emydex customer, Mort & Co
Centre: A statue of Sir Thomas Mort in Sydney Harbour, founder of Emydex customer, Mort & Co

 

Week 2 focussed on customer and prospect meetings in the North and South Islands in New Zealand. In New Zealand, Jeffrey and David met up with Ian Carson, as well as five Emydex NZ employees working around Auckland on North Island, and Christchurch on the South Island. Emydex staff travelled from their WFH locations to attend deferred Emydex Christmas parties in Auckland and Christchurch.

Customer visits included Wilson Hellaby, North Island, as well as visiting Christchurch to see Emydex in action in the Silver Ferns Beef primal processing plant in Belfast. The latter half of the week was spent in Dunedin for a series of meetings in Silver Fern Farms' head office, as well as meetings with prospects, and a potential partner company, Scott Technology.

 

Left: Wilson Hellaby, Auckland. Centre: SFF, Belfast, Christchurch. Right: SFF HQ, Dunedin

Left: Wilson Hellaby, Auckland. Centre: SFF, Belfast, Christchurch. Right: SFF HQ, Dunedin

 

Week 3 was spent mainly in Queensland, Australia, where Emydex has an office supporting our ten staff in South Brisbane in the city centre. Customer meetings were held over two days, with Mort & Co at their head office in Toowoomba, followed by a visit to see one of their feedlots in operation at Grassdale. In addition, a visit to see one of Mort & Cos supplier factories. Scheduling challenges meant the team had to settle for a virtual call with Emydex customer Sunpork, based in Eagle Farm, close to our Brisbane office. The remainder of the week included several prospective customer meetings in both Queensland and Victoria. The week ended with Birthday celebrations for long-serving Emydex employee Carl Brennan, a Lead Solutions Engineer with Emydex for over 10 years, who last year permanently relocated with his family from Ireland to Brisbane.

 

Left: most of the Emydex Brisbane office team. Centre: Grassdale feedlot. Right: Carl Brennan

Left: most of the Emydex Brisbane office team. Centre: Grassdale feedlot. Right: Carl Brennan

 

Overall, the three-week trip included nine customer meetings, as well as nine prospective customer meetings, and culminated with a visit by Charlie McConalogue, Minister for Agriculture, Food & the Marine of Ireland, Jane Connolly, Ambassador of Ireland to New Zealand, and a delegation from Enterprise Ireland to see Emydex in action in the Silver Fern Farms Ltd primary beef processing plant in Belfast, Christchurch.

 

L-R: Dylan Marsh, STREAMLINE Lead, Silver Fern Farms; Mary Kinnane, APAC Director Enterprise Ireland; Brendan Gleeson, the Secretary General in the Irish Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine; Matt Ballard, Chief Transformation Officer, Silver Fern Farms; Charlie McConalogue T.D, Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine of Ireland; H.E. Jane Connolly, Ambassador of Ireland to New Zealand; Jeffrey Macer-Wright, General Manager, Emydex Australasia; Niall Casey, Enterprise Ireland

L-R: Dylan Marsh, STREAMLINE Lead, Silver Fern Farms; Mary Kinnane, APAC Director Enterprise Ireland; Brendan Gleeson, the Secretary-General in the Irish Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine; Matt Ballard, Chief Transformation Officer, Silver Fern Farms; Charlie McConalogue T.D, Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine of Ireland; H.E. Jane Connolly, Ambassador of Ireland to New Zealand; Jeffrey Macer-Wright, General Manager, Emydex Australasia; Niall Casey, Enterprise Ireland

 

Emydex’s Technical Director, James Grennan will travel out to Australia and New Zealand in April for a series of technical workshops with Emydex customers.

Both David and James will return to Australia in July when Emydex will be exhibiting at the foodpro trade show in Melbourne from 23-26 July

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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 ian.carson@emydex.com. 

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 sales@emydex.com for more information.

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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 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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