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Introducing Emydex EQMS – Electronic Quality Management System

The Emydex Electronic Quality Management System (EQMS) has undergone a major redesign and redevelopment over the past 12 months, with significant input from some of Emydex’s largest multi-plant beef, lamb, pork and seafood processors operating in Ireland, the UK, Africa and Australia.

Taking all the learnings and experiences gained from previous Emydex QC system implementations; this latest release of the Emydex QC module is a fully comprehensive and extensive QMS system, designed to cater for the needs of large Enterprise-level food processing organisations.

The system is ideally suited to group-level food processors operating different business divisions, spanning different geographies, offering both real-time and accurate reporting on QC activities, at both group and individual plant-level via the Emydex QC cloud-hosted platform.

Maintain a sky-level overview of QC activities across divisions and operations within the organisation, in real-time

Cloud v On-Premises: In addition to hosting in the cloud, the system can alternately be installed on-premises if required.

Small v Large: It can also cater just as effectively for both small and medium-sized meat, fish and food processing plants, as well as larger production operations.

EMYDEX QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DEMO VIDEO

Key features include:

BUILD

QC Workflow Builder: one of the most significant improvements to the Emydex QMS, is a major design and development effort focussed on developing an easy-to-use, yet comprehensive QC workflow builder tool.

This application allows in-house Technical and QC personnel (non-IT people) to design and build their own Quality workflows in-house, including QC surveys, QC check sheets and quality audits, without the need to involve either Emydex developers or internal IT resources.

The result is an easy-to-use, icon-driven workflow builder application, powered by Question Blocks that can be saved as templates, and re-used from one quality survey to the next.

Workflows can include conditional responses such as ‘if the answer is X do A, if Y then B’, and includes Action Plans such as notifying supervisors, generating follow-up actions, sending emails, reminders, notifications, triggering CAPA workflows etc.

Configure QC workflows from scratch. Determine what questions to ask, and how best to capture the information needed.

CAPTURE

QC Workflow Data Capture: once QC workflows have been designed and tested they can be executed on the factory floor. Workflow surveys can be validated by running them in ‘test mode’ in which case, the test transactions are saved separately from ‘live’ QC data.

QC data capture can be carried out using a range of data capture hardware devices including existing fixed-position Industrial terminals, rugged tough-books or even low-cost tablet devices running the Windows 10 operating system.


Capture QC data such as CAPA workflows on low-cost tablet devices running Windows 10


Capture QC data such as Product Quality Checks on rugged Toughbook devices for harsh environments

Emydex Production System Look-up & Validation – One major advantage of the Emydex QC module, is that food processors who have also implemented an Emydex Factory Floor Production Control and Traceability reporting system in their operations, can scan product barcodes, retrieve traceability details, and perform validation from the Emydex QC system against production data stored in their Emydex Production system, something not possible with independent 3rd party QC systems.


Kill line QC inspections – logging QC faults against Carcasses within Emydex Production systems

REPORT

Instant Back-office Reporting via Plant Maps & Dynamic Data Views – whether operating in a single plant or group plant operation, managers and supervisors will have real-time access to QC data captured as it happens.

The QC module plant map drill-downs allow supervisors to ‘manage by exception’ drilling down to the areas where any QC issues or non-conformances are raised, to investigate and raise actions as needed.


Drill-down plant maps enable issues & non-conformances to be identified and actioned quickly

QC Data can also be viewed using Data Grids and Views that can be configured by users themselves, and saved as personal templates; allowing data to be grouped, sorted, filtered, analysed and exported to Word, Excel or Email if needed.

 Customise the way you view results, and decide what information you want to see and when

Emydex Report Writer – Emydex’s QC report writing application can also be used to prepare printed reports that can match exactly the format of the original paper-based QC surveys and check-sheets if required.


Original Paper-based QC Survey

Same QC data presented in similar report format post electronic data capture on an Emydex QC device

Other features worth highlighting include:

Production Calendars

Create multiple production calendars. Outline schedules relative to hours of operation.

Production Schedules

Create Schedules to control what needs to be done and when? Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly schedules

(1) Pre-production (2) Post-production or (3) During production at set interval checks – you decide

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 the authority to complete them.

Missed Workflow Notifications

Quality System will track missed Workflows. Automatically notify when a workflow is missing or not completed as scheduled.

Organisation

Assign QC Workflows to different Plants, Areas and Roles. Track what needs to be done where?

Equipment


Manage Equipment Lists. Create Preventative maintenance quality checks for equipment.

Actions Console

Log into your personal QC Actions console. Track all your Quality System Actions. See only Actions you are responsible for.

To organise an Online demonstration or request a 30-day free trial of the Emydex QMS System, please get in touch with Emydex on sales@emydex.com or call us via our contact numbers

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How the Food Industry should handle contamination

From salmonella in Maltesers to insecticide in eggs: how the food industry should handle contamination.

Businesses, regardless of size, should be responsible for their individual link in the food supply chain, so that product contamination can be recognised and dealt with effectively.

According to product liability barrister at a leading London law firm, scares such as the salmonella in Maltesers to eggs contaminated with insecticide are “nightmare scenarios” for the firms involved.

“As consumers, we have a right to assume that the things we buy on the shelves should be safe,” Alistair Mackenzie from Chambers 2 Temple Gardens said.

Food safety regulation is aimed at keeping consumers safe, he added, and to ensure there is no incentive for the industry to hide any issues that it discovers.

Often the law imposes penalties on a wide range of people involved in a contamination case, including those involved at any stage in the food arriving with the final consumer.

“In terms of keeping track of products, monitoring Maltesers products and eggs varies quite a bit, but the responsibility still remains,” said Mr Mackenzie.

“The key has got to be in meticulous record keeping. And making sure that the person you’re sending it on to is also keeping track.”

Mr Mackenzie held up the example of the scares with Mars and eggs as almost polar opposites in the way contamination cases should be handled.

“When Mars first recognised that there might be a salmonella problem, they put their hand up, as the law requires. This is a good example of what should be done; the affected products were clearly indicated and the contaminated was very heavily publicised,” he said.

Comparing this example with the news that eggs were contaminated with insecticide, Mr Mackenzie believes that Mars handled the media effectively and in a transparent way.

“With the eggs, it looks like there has been an attempt to play it down. And the number of eggs that were believed to have entered the UK rose from 21,000 to 700,000 in just one week,” he said.

“Granted, it’s more difficult to have any coordinated strategy in terms of tracking eggs. But more people are worried about the contamination of eggs than Mars products. You should be able to trace an egg from a consumer’s hand back to the chicken it came from.” 

According to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), under national and EU food rules, all food business have to keep traceability information – ‘one step forward and one step back’, i.e. records of from whom they received foods or food ingredients and (except in the case of retail sales) to whom it was supplied. And this information has to be supplied to the authorities on demand.

“The ability to trace and track products and ingredients is particularly important when food is unfit or unsafe and has to be withdrawn or recalled from the market.  The more detailed the traceability information kept, the narrower any recall or withdrawal will be,” a statement from the authority read.

“The FSAI deals with over 500 food incidents per year and overall our experience is that food businesses co-operate with withdrawals and recalls and provide the necessary detailed traceability information when asked or required to do so.”

Article written by Louise Kelly, Independent.

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Rosie & Jim Value Added Poultry Processor live on Emydex

Dublin – Ireland:
Rosie and Jim was established in 1997 when award winning craft butcher, Jimmy McLoughlin established Quality First Ltd and began producing gourmet chicken products for supply to butcher shops and restaurants. Today the company produces a wide range of premium quality, ready-to-cook gluten free breaded and battered chicken products.  They also produce a variety of delicious filled wraps.  All products are available chilled or frozen.

Order Control

Rosie and Jim approached Emydex in 2016 with a view to implementing a factory-wide Production Control and Traceability Reporting IT system door-to-door. The company had no existing factory floor IT system in place, operating manual processes instead, which meant excessive recording of internal processes manually on paper, which was both laborious and time-consuming, and offered little by way of real-time production control and traceability reporting.

The company had no real insight into the quantity or value of their existing stocks, resulting in procurement planning issues. Unsure of what current stocks were available to fulfil production orders, often resulted in over-ordering of stock, and the holding of excess stock of raw materials, dry goods and ingredients on-site than was needed.

Recipe Formulation

Another issue Rosie and Jim faced from their manual process was knowing how much each production batch cost to produce. Without knowing the precise amount of raw materials and ingredients going into each production batch, and without knowing the exact value of that stock, it was impossible to accurately calculate profit/loss and production yields.

Emydex’s Recipe Formulation Software system means that now, every item is scanned and weighed into a production job in the correct quantities. The system allows Rosie & Jim to track and record every item right down to the smallest measurement that was used in a production job. By doing this, Emydex determines the value of items used in production batches, allowing the system to calculate the cost of each production batch.

Real-Time Traceability Reporting

At Intake, Emydex allocates an internal traceability number (ITN) to each batch of supplier goods received, and the goods are labelled with barcodes and stored. From this point forward, the goods are tracked and traced by factory operators using hand-held scanning terminals, throughout the different stages of production, up to the point of sales order picking and dispatch, This allows for real-time traceability reporting throughout the plant, both for forward trace reporting from suppliers to end-customers, as well as backwards.

Sage Integration

Prior to go-live, Emydex was tightly integrated with Rosie & Jim’s existing Sage 200 accounting system, with Purchase Orders and Sales Orders pulled down from stage, and well as production data sent back to Sage for invoicing of customers and supplier payments.

Go-live

“We started using Emydex on the floor in two separate stages. First, we launched Emydex on our breading line while still using test data. This included the recipe blending and packing. By the end of the first week most of the production team using the system were already comfortable with using it. You could visibly see them speeding up when going through the individual screens.  

We also started to receive goods in from Intake onto the system. This has been simplest of part of the implementation. We soon after went live proper on the 1st of April. We first implemented Emydex on our mixes & tortilla line and began to pick our sales orders via the hand-held scanners. Overall, I feel the project was a successful implementation, and the new system has been well received by our production team, operators and supervisors, better than I could have expected”.

Peter Turner, Financial Controller with Rosie & Jim

Production Reporting

Rosie and Jim now have a comprehensive reporting structure on all aspects of their production processes. The Emydex back-office reporting module provides the company with a number of different views over their cost/value figures including Real-time stock inventory and valuation, Production costing, Production costing variances, Product usage reports, production yield reports and product giveaway reports.

Emydex also worked with Rosie and Jim to develop additional reports such as Production & packing time efficiency reports and daily stock movement reports.

“From a reporting side, by the end of the first week, our production manager and I started to see proper results with regards to yields, packing volumes and stock control. I would like to thank the Emydex team as they really helped, not only with the actual development but also with suggesting practical solutions to suit our processes e.g. line-side management.”

further comments by Peter Turner, Financial Controller with Rosie & Jim

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Emydex Partnership in Southern Africa

Johannesburg – South Africa:
Emydex Technology, based in Dublin Ireland, is a leading supplier of Factory Floor data capture, Production Reporting and Traceability Software systems to Meat, Fish, Poultry & Food processors around the world.

Emydex are pleased to announce details of an exclusive partnership agreement with Summit Process Solutions (SPS), based in Johannesburg, South Africa. SPS integrates factory floor Industrial hardware including weighing, labelling, inspection, processing, data capture, and IT systems to create tailor-made solutions for meat, fish, poultry and food processing companies operating in Southern Africa.

Summit Process Solutions

Summit Process Solutions partner with leading international suppliers of Industrial weighing, processing, labelling, packing and inspection systems such as Scanvaegt Systems in Denmark. Through such international partnerships, SPS are ideally placed to source, supply and maintain all Industrial hardware needed to operate Emydex software systems including Industrial touch-screen PCs, hand-held scanners, weighing scales and printers.

Lead by a hands-on, committed and experienced team comprising of Rodney Macer-Wright, Wilfred Koekemoer and Jeffrey Macer-Wright, SPS has over 50 years of combined Hardware & Software knowledge in the Southern African food industry.

“The partnership with Emydex enables Summit Process Solutions to provide Southern African food processors with comprehensive factory floor production systems with focus on full traceability, stock/warehouse management, yield and quality control. With the Emydex Factory Floor Software and the Scanvaegt weighing and data collection equipment, we can provide complete end to end factory floor software solutions to fit our customer’s requirements.” said Macer-Wright commenting on the Emydex partnership.

Meat Corporation Namibia

Emydex Technology have been active in the Southern African region since 2013 when they rolled out Emydex factory floor data capture, production control and traceability reporting systems to Meat Corporation Namibia (MeatCo)’s multi-site beef processing operations spread across Namibia. This installation included a full Emydex rollout to MeatCo’s head-quarter site in Windhoek that includes beef primal slaughter and deboning operations, a wholesale operation, value-added plant as well as a cannery operation. The Emydex solution deployed included kill line & payments, carcass management, processing and packing, warehousing & dispatch, value-added processing, yield and cost reporting, traceability, quality and compliance management.

Botswana Meat Commission

Emydex’s Packing and Processing software system has also been installed across Botswana Meat Commissions’ three beef production plants in Botswana at Lobatse, Francistown and Maun for Outer case marker (OCM) weighing and labelling operations in each plant. Plans are in place to complete the Emydex rollout from factory door-to-door in the group’s main HQ site in Lobatse by end of 2017. Furthermore, Emydex are about to begin implementation of the Emydex Coldstore Warehouse Management System in the Table Bay Cold Store in Cape Town South Africa.

Klein Karoo

In 2016 Emydex successfully installed its factory floor systems into Klein Karoo’s multi-site Abattoir, Deboning and Value added operations located in Oudtshoorn, Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam, South Africa. Klein Karoo being the largest Ostrich Processor in the world.

“Our partnership with Summit Process Solutions enables Emydex to provide a full turn-key solution to Southern African meat, fish, poultry and food processors by combining best-of-breed software solutions from Emydex, coupled with world-leading industrial hardware solutions that are supplied and maintained locally in Southern Africa by Summit Process Solutions. SPS have over 50 years’ experience working in our core industries in Southern Africa. They know the industry, they know the market, they know the customers. They are the ideal fit for Emydex as our dedicated partner and distributor within the region”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO

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Emydex Coldstore Management System Live in Dawn Meats UK

Halesowen – England:
Dawn Meats are one of the largest suppliers of Irish and British Beef and Lamb in Europe. They supply premium quality beef and lamb products to over 40 countries worldwide. Since 2007, Emydex software has been Dawn’s system of choice for factory floor data capture, production control, stock management and traceability reporting. Emydex iWAMS has been implemented as the groups standard solution in their 15 production sites located across Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and France.

Stock Management

In 2014 Dawn Meats bought a 99,000 sq ft distribution center in Birmingham, England for freezing, distributing and storing meat products. The Halesowen facility provides cold storage services for all of Dawn’s manufacturing plants in the UK.
Installed in 2015, the Emydex cold store warehouse system operating at the Halesowen site, provides Dawn Meats with a warehouse management system that manages, controls and reports on all cold storage processes at the plant. These processes include goods inwards, stock palletising, blast-freezing, stock put-away, sales order picking, container loading and order dispatch. In addition, the Emydex platform provides Dawn with the capability to carry out stock transfers, stock takes and stock reconciliation. This in turn provides the business (and entities owning the stock) with real-time accurate reporting of stocks.

Synchronized

Electronic links, which keep the sites Emydex systems synchronized with the Halesowen Emydex system, are in place between the Halesowen cold storage facility and each of Dawn’s production plants in the UK. These links are architected on Emydex’s proprietary ‘E-Transfer’ functionality. This enables the individual sites to send and receive real-time validation and reporting on all stock items shipped into and dispatched out of the cold store. Real-time transactional data on internal stock movements, pallet break-down and sales orders dispatched to customers are also sent via automated electronic E-Transfers.

ERP Integration

“Our requirement was to implement a solution in the Halesowen facility that would meet the needs of a cold storage business whilst also providing the individual sites with visibility into their cold-store stocks and all associated handling and storage costs. In our business model it was important to us that the sites retained the ability to select the individual units they wanted to be picked in order to best meet the needs of each customer.

It was clear that this would require tight integration between the production sites Emydex systems and whatever cold-storage solution was chosen. The Emydex Cold Storage system met most of the requirements of the business as standard. The inherent flexibility within the Emydex platform meant we were confident that we could work with their development team to tailor Emydex to fit our exact needs.

For example, Emydex were able to add functionality to the system to allow for box-level traceability throughout the blast freeze process. For our business, Emydex was definitely the right choice”.

Shane Slattery, CIO with Dawn Meats

Emydex software is integrated with Dawn’s central ERP system. This integration is architected using web-services to allow for complete control over the sales and purchase ordering processes. The ERP integration allows Dawn to draw down sales orders in real-time, manage picking rules, assign sales orders and print customer specific documentation.

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Clogherhead Fishermen’s Co-Op: Labelling at Sea

Fish Processing – Clogherhead Fishermen’s Co-Op

Clogherhead Fisherman’s Co-Op, is a leading Irish Seafood producer based in Clogherhead, Co. Louth, on the East Coast of Ireland. This video describes how Clogherhead Co-Op use Emydex’s Production Management and Traceability software on their fleet of trawlers as well as throughout their processing factory for data capture, labelling of product at sea, landings, into-warehousing, sales order picking and dispatch, providing Clogherhead Co-Op with real-time and accurate Traceability reporting from boat-to-truck.

Emydex’s Labelling at Sea software operating on the fleet of twelve frozen at sea trawlers, enables on-vessel printing, meaning product arrives to shore already labelled, saving time and ensuring full Traceability from the boat to the customer.

<!–Clogherhead Co-Op Video–>

Fish Processing and Traceability

Processing and Traceablility

Project Highlights

“The key for me is that Emydex were able to provide Clogherhead with their standard fish system built in consultation with BIM (Irish Fisheries Board), the SFPA (Seafood Fisheries Protection Agency), as well as the GS1 (Global Standards agency), but allow Clogherhead to tailor and tweak the system to suit our specific needs and processes exactly.
Aside from our old factory floor system, we also previously operated a bespoke-built boat invoicing and payments system.

Emydex were able to configure and build into their standard Fish system, the very same functionality as our previous system, meaning we now have everything we need in a single system, supported in-life by the Emydex support team. After a year at sea, the Co-op that includes the factory and fleet of boats all see the efficiencies and savings realised from our new labelling-at-sea systems”

Paul Boyd, Managing Director – Clogherhead Co-Op

“This project included a first for Emydex, in that our software is now operating on a fleet of boats in an offline environment, but at the same time has proved very successful. Hopefully over time this is something that will be adopted by the fishing industry as a whole”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO

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