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Emydex New Hires in Dublin, Australia & North America

In line with continued growth and expansion, mainly in overseas core markets, Emydex is pleased to announce new hires across the board, joining the Emydex Project Management, Development, EQMS and Customer Support teams over the past few months.

Project Managers

Ann-Marie Caffrey joined the Project Delivery Team in September 2018. Ann-Marie has a Degree in Information Technology from Dublin City University and previously worked for Hewlett Packard as Senior IT Project Manager.

Ciara McIvor joined the Project Management Team of Emydex Dublin in August 2018. Ciara has a Master’s Degree in Project Management and over 5 years project management experience.

Development Team

Robin O’Neill joined Solution Delivery Team in June 2018. Robin studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Leeds and has over 10 years Software Development experience in all aspects of the software development lifecycle.

Ekaterina Pushkina, joined the Solutions Delivery Team of Emydex Dublin in October 2018. Kate has a Master’s Degree and over 18 years Software Development experience.

Varun Kasana, joined the Products Division Team. Kasana has a Master’s in Computer Science and has over 8 years’ Development experience.

Jose Rubio joined the Development Team in January 2019. Jose has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and moved to Ireland in 2011, working as a Software Engineer since 2012, and as a Team Lead since 2016.

Rory McGarrigle joined the Development Team in January 2019. Rory is an experienced software developer with over eight years’ experience across a wide variety of technologies, delivering challenging projects.

EQMS Team

Agnieszka Kregiel-Grzyb joined Emydex as an intern whilst completing a Software Development trainee course. Previously she worked in customer service for 8 years and completed a Management course in DIT. Most recently Agnieszka completed a Higher Diploma in Science in Computing at NCI.

Brian Shortall joined Emydex as a member of the Product Delivery Team. Brian has a Master’s Degree in Web Technologies and is currently working as a Software Developer as part of Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) project.

Support Team

Robert Timmons Holds an Honours degree in Software Engineering from IT Carlow. He has a passion for tracking down and fixing the root cause for issues that arise and resolving customer issues as fast and as efficient as possible.

Jonas Betancor De Leon Originally from Lanzarote, Canary Islands, has an Aviation Management Degree from UAM and a Higher Diploma in Science in Computing from Institute of Technology Blanchardstown.

Emydex Australia

Alan Doocey moved to Australia from Ireland in June 2018 to join the Australian support and implementation team. Alan was previously the IT Manager for Dawn Pork and Bacon.

Ajay Kakumani, joined the Solutions Team of Emydex Australia in October 2018. Ajay has a Bachelor’s Degree and more recently a Post Grad. Diploma in Computer Science and has over 7 years’ Technical experience, most recently as Integration Specialist with Activate Technologies Ltd.

Emydex North America

Recruitment is ongoing to grow our team in North America.

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Emydex Australasia Market Update

Emydex Australia today announces the move to larger corporate offices in The Precinct in Central Brisbane. Located at 14 Browning Street, the new Emydex Australia Head-office is only a 5 min walk to South Brisbane train station, as well as Brisbane river walk that runs through Brisbane city.

The move coincides with a ramp up of the Emydex Australia team, with recent hiring of three new local software engineers, two of whom will join the Emydex Australia Solutions Implementation team, as well as one joining the local technical support team. This brings the total Emydex Australia headcount to eight, including local employees as well as a number of Emydex Ireland employees on secondment to Australia.

The Emydex Australia dedicated support team, works in tandem with the Emydex Ireland support team to provide 24x7 support coverage to Emydex customers located in 14 countries around the world. Recruitment is ongoing presently in Toronto, Canada, to add further support technicians to the global support team based there, for seamless 24x7 coverage for Emydex customers by way of 3 x 8 hour support shifts.

(Some of the Emydex Australia Team with David and James visiting from Ireland.)

Emydex signed its first Australian customer, Junee Lamb in New South Wales, in early 2015. Despite locating its head-office in Brisbane since then, Emydex Australia only recently added their first Queensland processing customer to the customer mix in September 2018, signing contracts with the Sunpork Group. Sunpork Group are the largest Australian owned pig producer and processor, with head-office operations located in Murarrie, Brisbane. Emydex are contracted to supply a factory floor data-capture, production control and traceability reporting MES system to service a new state-of-the-art Kill Floor and Boning room operations at the Swickers processing plant located in Kingaroy, three hours outside Brisbane.

Our most recent go live was Harvey Beef, based in Western Australia. Part of Harvest Road Group and privately owned by the Minderoo Group, Harvey Beef is Western Australia’s leading beef processor. In December 2017, Emydex were invited to submit a proposal to supply and implement a software system which would improve their ability to address their current issues and support growth plans. After the publication and evaluation of an RFP, and a competitive tender process, Emydex was selected to provide the full end to end factory floor processing system, in tandem with Empired being selected to implement Nav 2018, as their choice of back-office ERP system to cater for Harvest Road’s core financials and non-meat inventories.

Other Emydex customers in Australia include Wodonga Abattoir in Wodonga, O’Connor Beef in Packenham, as well as Victoria Valley Meat Exporters all based in Victoria.

Commenting on the recent expansion of its operations in Australasia, David McMahon, Emydex technology CEO based in Dublin, Ireland said “Australasia is one of three key export markets we are focussed on right now in addition to Africa and North America. Brisbane appears to have a ready supply of software engineers and technicians, compared with Ireland where they are in scarce supply. To the end, the plan is for the Emydex Australia team to grow in size, not just to cater for our customers based in this region, but also to support our global customers, as well as to participate in a number of New Product development projects we are planning to deliver over the next 18 months.

These include Group Production planning and Animal payment systems geared at larger multi-site group processors”. He added “Our vision is to become the No.1 partner of choice for Traceability, Quality and Production control systems with leading meat, fish and food processors in our four key global markets. To achieve this means a need to maintain sharp focus on our core product and service offerings, customers and markets, working with local partners in each region for both Industrial hardware and back-office ERP systems integration”

For more information on Emydex Australia, please contact Ian Carson at  ian.carson@emydex.com.au

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Emydex North America Market Update

Emydex Technology, a Dublin company specialising in Traceability Software for the food processing industry, have secured its third customer in the North American market. This contract brings to 120 the number of processing plants using Emydex software worldwide, in 14 countries. The company secured its first North American contract in Canada two years ago with pork processor Donald’s Fine Foods and has since closed a deal with Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco).

Emydex was established in 2004 by co-founders James Grennan and Redmond Burke to offer fish and pork producers and food processors an integrated production management system tailored to their needs.

Now led by chief executive David McMahon, Emydex employs more than 50 people at its Dublin headquarters and overseas offices in Canada, Australia and South Africa. The company’s factory- floor software is aimed primarily at large-scale processors. The software combines production control with traceability and quality reporting, yield analysis, stock and food safety management.

“We’ve now moved into the Saas (software as a service) space,” said McMahon.

“We are very focused on our three export markets: Africa, Australia and North America.

“We have spent 12 years developing solutions for 60 customers, with 120 plants around the world, and the question then became ‘what else do they need from us?’.

“We’ve spent the last two years building an online quality management system and that’s been really successful. We then went back to our customers with ten other products we were thinking of building and asked them ‘how interested are you?’.

“They came back and offered to help us with design and testing. So, we’re now working on three new products, two of which are Saas, for group production planning group animal payments and Factory of the Future.”

An export-led company, Emydex has customers in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Namibia. The firm targets countries with strong meat exports, a relatively low concentration of large-scale processors and a strong regulatory framework for food traceability.

Emydex is a client company of state agency Enterprise Ireland. “They have helped us with R&D grants for new product development and internationalisation grants to help market entry into our key new markets,” said McMahon.

Written by Elaine O’Regan – Sunday Business Post

The Business Post

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Electronic Quality Management Systems for the Food Industry

Quality Management Systems (QMS) are essential in each sector of the Food Industry, to ensure safe, quality food for the consumer. Food Safety and Quality audits are commonly used across the food industry to evaluate management systems, obtain certification from certain food and quality standards, assess the conditions of premises and products, and so on.

More and more Food Processing Plants are adopting Electronic Quality Management Systems to enhance their competitiveness on the global market and in response to growing pressure for consistent product quality, as well as the need for companies to demonstrate their quality management practices in order to meet the requirements of both legislation and the quality assurance practices of their customers.

After two years of continuous development and testing with significant input and validation from some of our largest food processing customer, Emydex in April 2018 released their Version 5 Electronic Quality Management System for Meat, Fish and Food Processors. The new Emydex EQMS stores all quality data in one centralised location, whether hosted in the cloud or installed locally on premise, depending on customer preferences.

The system provides Quality and Technical managers with accurate and holistic view of all Quality metrics and performance data as it happens in real-time across the organisation.

One core feature of the system is the ability to build and run in-house configured Quality checks and audits (workflows). By ‘in-house’ we mean QC workflows designed and built by QC staff, not the organisation’s in-house IT department. QC workflows are a series of Quality checks, questions and processes all wrapped into one.

The workflow builder offers QC users the ability to add conditional pathways, whereby the following questions presented are based on previous answers received from the operator i.e., if answer is A then 1, if B then 2. It also offers the ability to raise and track completion of follow up actions arising during audits and quality checks via email notifications. Any quality workflow in the system can be allowed to run at any time or can operate to a pre-defined schedule e.g., a pre-operation check, post-operation check or interval production check every two hours.

There are a number of major benefits arising from creating and assigning pre-defined schedules to QC workflows, including allowing management to identify when a QC workflow was:

  1. Missed
  2. Not started or completed on-time
  3. Completed in a time much faster than the average taken by other QC users, indicating that perhaps the survey was completed without adequate care and attention.

There are no hiding places in summary. The system also provides users with the option to indicate the reason why the check was missed, and automatically triggers follow up actions.

The Emydex EQMS provides the ability to create an electronic view (‘grid view’) for QC operators and managers to review and analyse QC data captured on the plant floor in detail. It also provides the option to generate in-house designed formatted reports that can be saved as a PDF, printed or sent to 3rd Parties, Auditors or emailed internally.

Additionally the system includes a fully functional document management and version control system, meaning documents can be uploaded to the EQMS system and readily made available to users as they complete workflows eg. retrieving details of a product spec during a product check and comparing the product on the line to the image in the documented product specification.

All documents and workflows can be managed via version control. This allows the back-office users to ‘check-out’ documents and workflows to make changes without affecting the Quality operation on the floor. Once they are happy with the changes, they can submit the document or workflow for approval and once approved, it becomes the active version on the floor.

For any Food processors that have already implemented the Emydex Production control and Traceability reporting modules the factory floor, a major advantage of the Electronic Quality Management System, can run the EQMS in tandem with their Emydex production system giving the ability scan product bar-codes, retrieve traceability details from Emydex’s production system database, and perform validation from the Electronic Quality Management System against production data stored in their Emydex Production system, something not possible with independent 3rd party QC systems.

The system incorporates both photographic as well as video evidence data capture.

To date the EQMS system has been implemented in numerous meat, fish and food processing plants, with both existing as well as new Emydex customers in Ireland, UK, Namibia and Australia with processors including Dawn Meats Group, Kepak Group, MeatCo Namibia as well as Dawnfresh Seafoods in Scotland. Dawnfresh currently operate the system on over 30 factory floor QC tablets spread over their two production facilities in Uddingston and Arbroath in Scotland.

A summary of some of the main features included in the system is below. If you are interested in an on-line demonstration or running a one-month free trial, please contact Shane Hayes, Emydex Technical Sales Manager on +353 1 8855990 or email shane.hayes@emydex.com

EMYDEX QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DEMO VIDEO

Summary features include:

Production Calendars and Schedules

  • Create calendars to keep track of scheduling
  • Define operating hours/days
  • Specify hourly, daily, weekly & monthly workflows
  • Checks to be completed pre, post or during production
  • Missed workflow notifications – automatically notify when a workflow is missing or not completed

Schedule Workflows

  • Schedule Workflows with a click of a button. Apply zero, one or many schedules to a workflow as required

Roles & Responsibilities

  • Assign QC Workflows only to those responsible for them.
  • Assign Actions only to those with authority to complete them.
  • Email notifications for assigned actions.

CAPA + RCA + PM Faults

  • Construct your own Corrective/Preventative Action path to ensure you collate all data against the record that was non-conforming

Document Management Storage

  • Upload, store and maintain your documents within the system. access these documents during your workflows on the production floor
  • Procedures documents can be shared / accessed across multiple sites / plants

Version and Revision Control

  • Build your various version and revision control for all documents and workflows. Know who changed what, when and why.

Organisational Set-Up

  • Setup the company’s organisational structure within the system to control user access.

 

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Kill Line Live in Central Agri Group, Victoria, Australia

In 2016 Central Agri Group, formerly Central Meat Exports, re-opened their newly refurbished beef plant in Trafalgar as Victoria Valley Meat Exports. This is a state of the art, fully integrated, beef processing plant in Victoria, Australia. As part of the Central Agri Group of companies, VVME is focused on major export markets including the Middle East and South East Asia.

Having been in operation for several months, it was determined that the current systems did not meet the needs of this modern, export focussed business, as the various modules were not integrated and lacked the features found in a modern, integrated system. Processes such as interfacing to the NLIS database, preparing the kill agenda, generating payments and reporting were all complicated and in some cases completely manual.

In light of these requirements, VVME contacted Emydex with a view to replacing their existing system, starting with the slaughter floor and then moving on to the boning hall including stations for into-boning, offal packing and carcass dispatch, with carton dispatch to follow.

 

Kill Line Software

The kill floor went live recently with Emydex’s kill line software systems running on four on-floor data capture computers starting from an NLIS scanning station that checks the animal status in real -time against the NLIS database through to Dentition, Carcass defect and Weigh-Grading stations.

The Emydex back-office system allows for the kill agenda to be generated from bookings made earlier, many of which are themselves created by a direct import of the XML ‘purchase advice’ from the various sale-yards, with all associated costs and individual animal RFID details attached.

Data from the slaughter floor is approved, which then generates a payment invoice (recipient created tax invoice) to the supplier with very little manual manipulation using flexible payment grids. The kill data is loaded directly from Emydex to the NLIS database again streamlining the processes and adding efficiencies.

 

Electronic Quality Management System

With the slaughter floor fully live, the company is now moving ahead to implement the next phases over the next few months. The final step will be to incorporate the Emydex ‘Quality Management’ system which will integrate the Production processes with a Quality system which, being Cloud based, could potentially be expanded to include Central Agri Groups other processing facilities in other locations.

Commenting shortly after the initial Emydex system go-live at the plant, Colin Reidy, IT and QA Manager for the Central Agri Group stated:

“To be honest, that was the smoothest rollout I have ever been involved in. Even if you take the minor changes performed today, the system worked as intended with little to no intervention.

Ian’s knowledge combined with Carl’s skills made the last few improvements today practical and worthwhile.

The operators all responded positively and actively engaged with both the Emydex team and the software system.

As for the office, I walked in at 5am as normal and 5 mins later I ran out of things to do. Normally I am hard pressed to have the agenda out by 6:15 let alone get any QA checks done. Then this afternoon, after a couple hours playing with the pricing we had the final feedbacks done by 2:30pm - a task that quite easily takes me to 6pm most nights.

So to say I’m happy is an understatement.”

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Keeping up with demand in North America

Over the past 2 years the meat, poultry and seafood industries in North America have seen positive production increases for all protein sectors. There is a general sense of optimism about the industry as they look forward to the future. Consumer consumption rates for meat, poultry and seafood continue to increase, creating increased demand in both domestic and international markets.

These increased demands have created a culture of unrelenting focus on operational efficiencies in processing plants. Companies are looking to technology to support measurement of current processes to support continual improvements.

Processors were pushed to make the most of good economic conditions in 2018 and into 2019, sales projections are up, acquisitions are occurring more frequently, and expansion is happening in the meat, poultry and seafood industry.

As baby boomers retire and millennials move into and up the organisation, protein processors need to rethink their approach for managing and measuring the efficiency of their production lines. As the labor market continues to tighten, protein processors will need automated measurement of their line results to minimise manual labor required and to be able to provide the instant feedback across the organisation.

Emydex Software enables processors to get continual feedback from the production floor and allow some of the management positions to work remotely, through access to the Emydex tools.

Running the right shop floor solution can streamline your processing and packaging operations, expedite recalls and accurately predict yields and cost productions. The current ERP solutions lack this functionality and require a solution like Emydex to address those deficiencies. North American Meat Processors are recognising that most ERP applications support the office needs but they do not meet the unique shop floor needs of a meat processor.

Emydex Technology specialise in Factory Floor Software for Food Processors and are focusing on North America as one of three core export markets. Having secured its third customer in the North American market, this latest contract brings to 120 the number of processing plants using Emydex software worldwide, in 14 countries. The company secured its first North American contract in Canada two years ago with pork processor Donald’s Fine Foods and has since closed a deal with Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco).

Terry McCorriston, Emydex North American Business Analyst and shop floor software vendor for the meat and seafood industry, previously worked as the director of CSB-Systems, and was IT Manager at J.M. Schneiders Inc., a large meat processor in Canada. Terry has spoken at numerous international conferences on the importance of product costing in the meat industry.

Terry is certified with APICS (American Production and Inventory Control Society), to be able to provide sound recommendations on supply chain and operational processes.

Terry has a passion for helping protein industry companies improve their operations with use of technology.

For more information on the Emydex system, contact local agent Terry McCorriston 

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