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Emydex 4.0 upgrade

Emydex 4.0 upgrade

In line with Microsoft’s release of .NET 4.0 / 4.5 frameworks, Emydex took the opportunity to focus our Product Development team’s attention on a number of area’s we felt could be improved upon

The Emydex 4.0 release focuses on both the user interface ‘look and feel’ and ease of use of the Emydex system, as well as performance improvements. Many of the improvements arise on the back of enhancements in .NET and as such .NET 4.0 / 4.5 is the minimum framework requirement for this latest Emydex release

Metro Theming

In tandem with the release of .net 4.0/4.5, Microsoft also released the new Metro design language. This set of guides and best practices were compiled by Microsoft for use with applications targeting touch type interfaces. For Emydex 4.0 we worked on both the MDA (Mobile Device Application, typically used on rugged toughbook devices etc.) and SDA (handheld scanning terminal) theming to incorporate these guidelines.

We opted for a dark theme after doing tests under the sort of lighting conditions found on factory floors. Emydex also refreshed our iconography for both of these apps, opting for simpler, clean, icons over more detailed ones. Finally we have reduced the amount of variance in our colour pallet and assigned meaning to particular colour types so that screens flow much better.

Core Platform Improvements

For Version 4.0 we concentrated on improvements to all of our core products.

  • UI Clarity. Where it made sense, we reviewed the core UI, as well as reviewing every line of code in order to optimise it, making it leaner and more efficient to execute. We tidied up menu items, iconography etc. in order to improve the ease of use of the EMYDEX system overall.
  • Touch Usage Improvements. Particularly in the MDA and SDA, we wanted to improve our touch screen usability. All grids in the MDA use inertial scrolling (like on phones and tablets). This will also be available soon on the PCA (Industrial PC Terminal). We added many more keyboards and popup screens to both the MDA and SDA. Finally we added better controls filtering and sorting on a touch screen.
  • Update / Patch improvements. We overhauled our Update and Patch solution. Developers that work with our larger customers will, as of version 4.0, find it easier to patch or update Emydex when required to do so. This improvement should see time saved for our customers as devs can work quicker and easier when patching or updating the system.

Standardisation

Version 4.0 marked the creation of a standardised Emydex industry modules, focussing on the Fish processing industry initially. Efforts to standardise portions of our system have been of benefit to our existing customers too, for example:

  • Improvements to the SDA. The SDA has had a UI overhaul to make it easier to work with. Cleaner on screen keyboards and buttons have been added. Performance improvements in core SDA modules exist for all customers on version 4.0
  • Cloud Delivery. Our standard system is Cloud Delivered and optionally Cloud Managed, by providing both delivery and management in the cloud we can offer much greater flexibility to our customers in terms of solutions that fit their needs.
  • Label Management. As of Version 4.0 Labels can be managed centrally and stored in Emydex. Labels do not have to be stored on a share any longer. This allows labels to be managed on the client and synced to workstations easier than before.

Maturation of MDA

In the last major version release of Emydex we introduced the MDA (Mobile Device Application). The idea of the MDA was to have an app that was lighter than the PCA, could work offline, and would work better with tablet type devices. Version 4.0 brings a number of important changes to our MDA app, including:

  • File based SQL backend. This allows much easier management of the local database. There are no specific extras to install or set up and because the whole database exists as a file, it can be sent to us for debug purposes with ease.
  • Faster screen load times. Changes and performance improvements to our core have improved our screen loading times on the MDA. We measure 20% improvements in many instances.
  • Weight to Label time improved. The MDA contains an overhauled transaction engine which improves the speed of transactions. This means a faster turnaround time when weighing a box to putting a label on it.
  • The MDA now has the ability to use pop up style forms. This means we can make our UI’s less busy going forward and afforded greater ease of use to touch screens. All of our popups are multi-level meaning one popup and sit on top of another. This allows layer of features in ways we could not do before.

 

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Emydex Products Update

Emydex’s dedicated Product Development team of 5 developers now work out of a separate innovation centre located in Unit 13, Northwest Centre. The team have been busy over the past 6 months working on next our generation Emydex software systems including Emydex Standard Systems, an iteration of the Emydex platform hosted in the cloud (Emydex-On-Demand) as well as many more new features including a new direct label printing (DLP) engine. The product development team are also re-engineering our core internal tool chain and libraries with the creation of a new CCL (Common Core Libraries).

Emydex Standard Systems

As the Emydex platform has matured over the past 10 years, we have seen commonalities emerge in the features our customer’s request. Overtime, functionality has begun to gravitate towards a standardised set of rules and methodologies. In tandem we have asked by some food processors to provide Emydex systems with less reliance on customisation in favour of ease and speed of installation, deployment, usage and management.

Typically smaller to medium sizes food processors have enquired after such standardised systems. The Emydex Standard Systems (ESS) project takes all the Emydex experience and know-how gained in designing and deploying production management systems for our customers over the past 10 years, to produce our standard versions of each essential component within in a typical end-to-end food production process from Intake, through Into-Production, Packing, Labelling, Order Picking and Dispatch

Standard Intake: The goal of this project phase is to standardise the process of goods-in and quality control. We will take a number of different features from existing systems and blend them together to provide a standardised Intake module. This new module will be released on our MDA software (that can operate on Industrial PC terminals) and is broken down into the following deliverables:

  • Initial Intake
  • QC Hold and Intake Returns
  • QC Release
  • Post Intake / Raw Goods In

product_update

You may also notice we have done a lot of work around our new embedded scales indicator, including re-skinning and adding further validation functionality around limits and checks. This indicator is just one of the new standardised components being built in tandem with standard packing:

productupdate_02

Standard Warehousing: This project phase will see a re-write of our standard dispatch warehousing system (SDA) that typically runs on hand-held scanning terminals such as the Motorola Symbol MC9090 range. Some key deliverables of the SDA standardisation project will include:

  1. Swapping out Windows CE database running on handhelds for SQL Lite eliminating the requirement to install IIS on local servers and to sync via IIS services. SQL lite is also a higher performing database than SQL CE.
  2. Customising the SDA application to work with Emydex-on-demand i.e., delivery via the cloud, licencing and subscription services for value-added/overseas resellers
  3. Reworking of SDA application to work more seamlessly with higher resolution screen-sizes eg., MC9190
  4. Creating a version of the new CCL to work with the compact framework
  5. Standardisation of SDA forms such as:
  • QC Release
  • Into Production
  • Return From Production
  • To Rework
  • Palletizing
  • Movements
  • Stock Reconciliation/Cycle
  • Order Picking
  • Shipments
  • Customer Returns

The Emydex Standard Systems project takes the best of each of our systems and applies a common standard across the whole suite of products. Configuration will be provided; that will allow each customer to configure their system to meet their own needs without the need for Business Logic or custom code written by Emydex. While configuration is not as extensible as customisation, we feel it will provide ample personalisation for smaller food processors who do not have m/any internal IT staff.

Emydex On-Demand

Emydex on Demand is an iteration of Emydex delivered via and powered by the cloud (Microsoft Windows Azure). Emydex on Demand will enable Emydex to deploy systems to our customers in a fraction of the time, to maintain and upgrade systems quicker and easier, and allow customers more freedom than any comparable system on the market in terms of installation availability.

Many distributors working within our specialised food processing industries, both here and overseas, have expressed a desire to have the ability to install and manage Emydex systems for their customers. Traditionally the level of customisation desired by customers meant that only Emydex and it’s team could reasonably manage a customers requests. With Emydex on Demand and its configuration model, we will be able to provide a partner system with industry champions who wish to offer Emydex as a solution to their customers. Both Emydex and it’s partners will be able to support customers ranging from small all the way to enterprise level and provide standardised solutions with custom configuration on a per customer basis.

Direct Label printing

Traditionally label printing has presented a bottleneck for fast paced production. Because of the complexity of label design and templating, printing is usually provided via Windows Spooler or via supporting functionality from a given Label Designer company, both of which are slow. Our innovation team has designed a new direct label printing engine that allows customers to design labels in a third party label designer (we currently support NiceLabel) and import them into their Emydex system. By importing the label in to Emydex we can then optimise and print the label directly over TCP or Serial resulting in noticeably quicker print times. The direct label printing engine will be available for our Client, PCA, and MDA for all customers. Emydex will continue to support and maintain Nice Labels in tandem which will better suit our customers that require more WISIWIG type functionality, but for those in the need of high-speed label printing (such as retail production lines) the DLP engine will be the better option.

Common Core Libraries

At Emydex we have an extensive collection of internal tooling and support libraries which enable us to build great software. The Common Core Libraries or CCL for short is a reworking of these libraries and tools that includes automated testing, improved documentation and modernisation. While the CCL is an internal project for the most part, the improvements it brings will be noticeable from a customer’s perspective. Some of the deliverables of interest to our customers include:

  • A completely new and powerful logging system which will provide testers and support with detailed and relevant information for the purposes of troubleshooting or diagnostics. With this new system we are able to identify slowdowns and bottlenecks in our software down to 1/3rd of a millisecond.
  • A modern and robust threading model. Threading is complicated but it allows software to be much more responsive by allowing tasks to run in the background without impacting the front end. We have built a new threading model that is much easier to implement and manage from a developers perspective. This will allow our developers to run more work as background tasks, which in turn will improve the responsiveness of our system.
  • We now use the CCL as a test bed for a specific type of testing (Unit testing). Unit tests are extremely small, automated tests. These tests break code down into logical units and test if the unit behaves as expected. What makes unit tests so useful is the fact that thousands of tests can be ran at the click of a button with no interaction from a developer.

Emydex Standard Systems, Emydex-on-Demand, Direct Label Printing and other products and enhancements like CCL represent Emydex’s continuing drive to evolve to meet the needs of customers now and in the future.

By investing heavily in our existing products and innovating based on customers’ needs we feel we are in the best position possible to provide systems that work to optimise and support your business.

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Emydex opens New Product Development office

In line with continued growth and customer successes, Emydex this month (March 2013) opened a second office in Northwest Business Park that will focus purely on New Product Development (NPD).

The NPD team, led by Emydex co-founder and CTO, James Grennan and an initial team of three dedicated software engineers have moved to Unit 13, three doors down from Emydex’s main head office in Unit 10.
The existing offices in Unit 10 will now focus entirely on Emydex Customer Implementation projects, led by Daniel Simonavicius, as well as Customer Support, managed by Emydex’s Customer Service Manager, Lorna Daly. Daniel’s team of ten experienced programmers are responsible for the design and implementation of tailored systems for Emydex customers. Once customer systems are live and bedded-in, they are handed over to Lorna’s team of four dedicated programmers to support customer projects in-life.

James and his R&D team have an ambitious twelve month product development roadmap ahead of them to develop such systems as:

Emydex Standardised Systems (ESS): geared toward rollout of Emydex systems to smaller and medium sized food processors, systems that can also be customised and tailored by Emydex Value-added resellers and partners in overseas markets

Emydex On-Demand (EOD): a cloud-based iteration of the Emydex Production Management system whereby the central production server, usually hosted onsite in a customer’s factory is hosted in the cloud on a Microsoft Azure platform. Emydex software will still be loaded onto factory floor hardware devices such as PC terminals, handheld scanners and rugged Toughbook’s as normal. It will just mean all factory floor data captured will be securely stored in a centralised cloud-based production server, accessible from anywhere in the world.

Speaking on the recent move James Grennan commented “the R&D team now has the space and freedom to put some structure around the chaos that can be involved in brainstorming new ideas and designing new products and services. We have space to map our ideas, plans and designs that we didn’t have in Unit 10. Unit 13 gives us the mind-space to really focus on our product development plans in a big way”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO added “The move to Unit 13 frees up space in Unit 10 to extend both the Customer Implementation and Support teams. Unit 13 has enough square-footage to accommodate up to 20 additional people. This gives us some breathing space and room for further growth. Our business plans are to grow to around 40 people by the end of 2014.”

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Future Trends

What are meat processors and retailers currently looking for from IT systems? What is driving that demand (e.g. legislation, environmental and/or other)? What are the general trends? Future trends?

In our experience meat processors are generally looking for five things when deciding to implement new software systems.

  • Full integration between Financial and production systems
  • Dynamic Yield reports that highlight areas where improvements can be made
  • Dynamic reporting of the status of production against plan
  • Accurate reporting of stock, with age analysis and availability
  • Fast, accurate order picking and containerising, ensuring documentation does not hold up deliveries.

The drivers are usually one or a combination of requirements to drive efficiencies, legislative demands, customer demand and ultimately profitability.

Future trends are definitely towards more automation in processing. Emydex are actively involved in shop floor automation projects specifically designed to improve yield, throughput and efficiency.

Minimizing operator involvement is also high on a list of customer priorities, Emydex systems are being used to plan production in the office and then issue those plans to the shop floor to control production using RFID tracking and shop floor automation, with the minimum of operator involvement.

A key benefit that results from implementation of all of the above functionality is traceability that is second to none. Emydex systems record the full history of everything that has happened to a product, whether it is a forward trace, backward trace or mass-balance traceability report. Furthermore, for re-usable containers such as refrigerated containers, crates, dolav’s (pallet boxes), hooks and gambrels, Emydex can even trace the history of every product that has ever been in that container.

Emydex on Demand

The Emydex team have been quietly developing a solution which we expect to have a major impact on small to medium size processors who do not have their own in house IT departments.

Emydex on Demand utilises the power and availability of the internet for the deployment of new standard solutions being developed. Emydex on Demand is a hybrid solution, not running fully as “Software as a Service” (i.e. Hosted in the cloud);

Emydex recognise that processors still need to be able to label boxes even if the network connection is down. As such the new standard Emydex application programs for data collection will run on the data collection terminal itself, not on the internet, the terminals will also have their own off line database allowing operation to continue even if internet connection is not available.

The Emydex database however will be hosted on the Microsoft Azure “cloud platform” this platform is constantly being updated by Microsoft in terms of both hardware and software. Back up is also inbuilt into the Azure package. From a support point of view, Emydex technicians are dealing with one standard database. Software deployment of both shop floor and office applications is achieved simply by selecting a hyperlink which automatically downloads and installs the application programs.

Emydex Apps!

Not quite the same as those thousands of little programs that can be down loaded to your smart phone or tablet but following the same idea. Emydex will be launching a sequence of standard shop floor applications for collecting data, printing labels and reports for commonly used applications in the food industry.

Each application will have a shop floor component and a corresponding back office component. Both components will connect to the Emydex on Demand database running in the cloud. Developed using the combined 130 years of food industry experience inherent in the Emydex design team, the standard apps will have a degree of built in configurability enabling them to meet the majority of users requirements.

Initial apps being developed are:

  • Outer Case Marking Station
  • Individual Pack Labelling Station
  • Recipe Formulation Station
  • Intake Station
  • Dispatch Station
  • Into/Out of Process Station

If a user invests in more than one application they will share the same database, enabling Emydex standard client applications for reporting on Process, Yields and Stocks.

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Emydex Livestock Payment System

All three flavours of the Emydex multi-species livestock payments system are now live and running in abattoirs spread across Ireland and the UK.

Emydex’s Beef payments system is live in Liffey Meat’s plant in Ballinasloe, as well as Euro Farm Foods in Ireland. The Lamb payments system is live in Scotlamb (Vivers) in Scotland and the Emydex Pig payments system in Dawn Pork and Bacon in Ireland. Since being installed at these plants the system is being considered by a number of plants in the UK and Ireland, and even further afield in mainland Europe and Africa via our re-seller network.

Integration with other Emydex Kill Line Components

The payments system integrates with Emydex’s livestock booking component in order to ensure that any special prices applied at the time of booking are used for the payments. If no special prices are used then the system defaults to a base price per species/category.

When integrated to the payments system the booking component is able to retrieve the previous historical prices paid to a producer and the previous quality of animals received. This is for assistance when special prices need to be negotiated.

Whilst the main kill data is read from the Emydex carcass classification component, the payment system is in effect a stand-alone module, and whilst integration with other Emydex kill line components offers advantages, they are not compulsory. The Emydex payments system is capable of integration with any supplier’s kill line systems.

Settlement Schemes

The payment system itself is highly configurable. The method of calculating the amount to be paid for each carcass is called a ‘settlement schedule’. Whilst it would be simplest to administer if there was a single settlement schedule for all producers, this is often not possible. The system therefore allows any number of settlement schemes to be created and allocated against producers/agents.

Each settlement scheme can be made up of any number of elements. All schemes will start with a default base price/kg for each category of livestock being killed. In its simplest form this price is used to calculate the initial value of the carcass. Base prices can be over-written with prices agreed at time of booking, and/or at time of payment.

There are then a set of adjustment tables that are applied sequentially to the carcass to arrive at the final purchase price. Whilst these adjustments are normally always deductions, the Emydex system will allow bonuses to be paid for specific conditions.

Typical Adjustment tables would be:

Weight range table – with flat rate value paid above specific weights
Eurograde table – with adjustments based upon a grid of confirmation and fat class
Fault table – with adjustments based upon specific fault conditions
Quality table – with adjustments based upon the producers quality status

The Emydex system enables the user to set up as many adjustment tables as required using any parameter either captured in the system or recalled from the database.

The system has now calculated the individual value of each animal and the gross value of the lot. There are now a set of deductions that need to be applied to the gross value.

Again these deductions are created by the user. A specific set of deductions is defined for each settlement scheme.

Typical deductions (which can be specified as per kg or per head) include Haulage, Industry Levies, Veterinary Levies and Clipping Charges.

Pricing Screen:

Emydex Payments screen

Report Printing

Dependent upon the species/producer, there may be a requirement for the remittance advice note to show individual animals or grouped animals (e.g. by weight range or grade range). The system can be set to print either or both.

If the user requires it, the remittance advice note and cheque can be incorporated into the same document.

Reports are also available for any deductions specified.

Financial Integration

The Emydex payment system has the functionality to be operated in two modes.

Financial System Prints Cheques

In the first mode Emydex simply prints remittance advice notes and a list of all individual lot payments. This list is also available as a file for export into the user’s financial system for invoicing.

In the case of deductions, an invoice is normally received from the service provider, the Emydex deductions reports can be used to cross check the invoice amounts.

Emydex Prints Cheques

In this scenario the cheque is printed by the Emydex system (either attached to remittance advice note or on separate stationary). The Emydex system will also then print invoice lists with cheque numbers. This list is also available as a file for export into the user’s financial system.

Summary

The Emydex Livestock Payments System eliminates calculation errors by integrating the payment calculation system with the livestock classification system. It is a real time system that enables the payment calculation to be made as soon as a lot has been processed, significantly improving the efficiency of the payments office.

Historical data analysis enables processors detailed views of producer’s deliveries to the plant, such information can be shared with producers to the benefit of both parties.

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Emydex Embrace RFID Technology

Emydex have been a long time user of bar coding technology as a means of maintaining traceability throughout their applications. Whilst we have been aware of, and trialled RFID technology for the past few years, it is only in the last 12 months that Emydex have really started to utilise RFID technology in real-life operational environments, enabling our customers to gain from the benefits of its application.

There are essentially two types of RFID tags, passive and active.

Passive Tags
Passive tags are generally lower cost and have a longer life cycle. They are encoded at manufacture with a unique ID number. This ID number can only be read from the tag when it is inserted into a radio frequency field generated by an RF reader. The efficiency of the reading is dependent upon the strength of the field and the time that the tag is in the field. This generally means that the tag has to be as close to the reader as possible at the time of reading.

Active Tags
Active tags have their own power source in the form of a battery. They are therefore more expensive and have a finite lifetime (battery life). For this reason active tags are best utilised in closed loop systems where the tags never leave the premises. Like the passive tags they are encoded with a unique ID number at the time of manufacture. In addition an active tag can be manufactured with varying amounts of read/write memory, enabling applications to write variable data to the tag for later retrieval direct at a reading point.

By means of the internal battery the tag can broadcast its data at the same time as the tag readers are creating the reading field. This leads to a greater tolerance on reading distance.

rfid_tags

Advantages
The greatest advantage of RFID tags over bar coded tags is that the tag can pass through the reading field in any orientation; this makes total automation, without the necessity for operator interaction a viable proposition.

Emydex have used both types of tags dependent upon the application. In the case of carcasses being transported on an overhead conveyor there is no need for active tags. The tags are encapsulated in a heat and impact resistant plug which is embedded in the carcass hooks. As the hooks are on a track system the readers can be positioned very close to the hooks. The tagged hooks recirculate within the system and never leave the site. By positioning data capture equipment close to the reading locations Emydex are able to 100% verify correct carcass data with no possibility of sequencing errors.

Examples of data that can be captured and recorded in the system relative to the hook tag ID are:

  • Ear Tag
  • Dentition Data
  • Tissue Samples
  • Veterinarian Data
  • Carcass Inspection Data
  • Classification Data
  • Weight Data
  • Chill Location

 

After the classification, bar-coded carcass tag labels are printed enabling forward traceability reporting of the carcass, after it has been removed from the original carcass hook.

By situating readers at strategic points on the track it is possible to identify exactly where each carcass (and carcasses in a lot) is located in the abattoir.

Another application for which we are using RFID is the destination control and product/operator traceability of plastic crates (and products within) in a processing department.

Each crate in the system is embedded with an active RFID tag. This tag has a unique ID number and an amount of memory for reading and writing data.

Operators place their output products into the crates. Via strategically placed read/writers and data capture equipment, the contents of the crates can be identified against individual operators and individual processes. The required destination of the crates can be written to the tag, enabling subsequent tag readers to automatically direct the crate through the conveyor control system until it reaches its next process or packing machine destination.

The Benefits
The benefits of automating such processes are a smoother product flow, greater operator efficiency (enabling better throughput and yield), less drip loss due to shorter overall processing times, better traceability. Not only can the system 100% trace the contents of every crate but it can also identify every product that has ever been in that crate, and everywhere that crate has ever been.

This experience has resulted in Emydex investigating alternative applications for RFID, particularly regarding the speed benefits of being able to read multiple tags at the same time and the efficiency benefits of effective automation.

Our initial investigations suggest that every company can benefit from using RFID in closed loop systems (where the tagged containers stay on the site or stay within the group), whether connected with fully automated solutions or not; the readability of RFID tags without the necessity of line of sight (as with bar codes) can have a significant impact on efficiency.

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