More than twenty years after Dawn Meats Group first started working with Emydex, the partnership has been recognised with one of our twenty-year Customer Milestone Plaques. Earlier this month, the plaque was presented to Shane Slattery, Chief Information Officer at Dawn Meats Group, marking one of the longest-standing customer relationships in Emydex’s history.
About Dawn Meats Group
Founded in County Waterford in 1980, Dawn Meats Group is a family-owned business and a leading beef and lamb processor. The group employs more than 12,000 people across thirteen countries, operates eleven sites in Ireland, six in New Zealand and thirteen in the UK, and supplies retailers, manufacturers and foodservice customers in over 70 countries. Each year it processes around 1.6 million cattle, 8 million sheep and 70,000 deer, sourced from 30,000 farmers and 4,300 farmer shareholders.
How it started
Dawn Meats first began working with Emydex in 2005, in our own early years as a company, and started rolling out Emydex Production Management across the group in 2008. Grannagh, Rathdowney and Charleville went live in Ireland, followed in November 2009 by Highland Meats in Scotland, where the first phase centred on Carcass Management integrated to the plant’s existing kill line.
Martin Curran, then Group Factory Systems Manager at Dawn Meats, said at the Highland go-live:
It’s a credit to the joint Emydex/Dawn team that we are now in a position where with adequate planning, Emydex module roll-outs can be completed within a short space of time without any interruption to production.”
Within four years of the first rollout, the system was operating as the group standard for factory floor data capture, production control and traceability reporting in eleven of the thirteen plants in the group at that time, covering everything from carcass intake through boning, packing and dispatch.
Shane Slattery said at the time:
Emydex is a central pillar of our strategic IT plan going forward, and our goal now is to concentrate on completing the roll-out of Emydex to our primary processing sites by year end. This plan may seem aggressive, but we believe that it is achievable on account of the inherent flexibility of the core Emydex product to handle any differences in the business processes required in our disparate sites.”
What changed along the way
Quite a lot. In 2015 Dawn went live with Emydex Warehouse Management at its cold store and distribution site near Birmingham, covering goods inwards, blast freezing, put-away, picking and dispatch.
Then came quality. Dawn Meats’ factory checks had been paper-based until that point: printed, handed out, filled in, countersigned, filed, and physically retrieved whenever an auditor asked for them. The Emydex Quality Management System went live in two Irish plants in 2019. By 2024 it was running across fourteen primary processing plants in Ireland and the UK, and Dawn’s own technical team had built close to 500 quality workflows in it themselves, from abattoir and boning hall pre-op checks to GMP audits and metal detector checks, without needing to involve our developers or their internal IT department.
More than twenty years on
Twenty years is a long time in any technology relationship. Over that period Emydex has become part of how we run our plants, across production, traceability and quality. The reliability of the system matters, and so does the fact that the people behind it understand meat processing. We are pleased to mark the milestone and we look forward to what comes next.”
Shane Slattery, Chief Information Officer, Dawn Meats Group
Two decades brings a lot of change: new sites, new customers, new regulations, new people on both sides. What matters is that the system has kept earning its place through all of it. The milestone plaques are our way of recognising that.
Dawn Meats Group is one of a number of Emydex customers now reaching ten years or more with us, across beef, pork, lamb, poultry and seafood processing in Ireland, the UK, Australasia, Africa and the Americas.
Congratulations to Shane and everyone at Dawn Meats Group and thank you for the trust you have placed in our team over more than twenty years.
To learn more about how Emydex supports beef and lamb processors with production management, traceability and quality systems, visit our Beef Processing Software and Lamb Processing Software pages, or contact our team.
