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Emydex site visit to Sustainable Beef, Nebraska

Visiting Sustainable Beef in Nebraska

Earlier this month in Mid-November,  Shane Hayes, Emydex Product Manager and Cody Musclow, Project Manager with Emydex North America, visited the new Sustainable Beef packing plant in North Platte, Nebraska as part of our business discovery, and requirements gathering phase. In this article, we share highlights from the Emydex Sustainable Beef Nebraska site visit and what it means for our North American strategy.

The visit marked a significant step in this latest Emydex project with Sustainable Beef, enabling Emydex to gain deeper insights into the workings and processes within this greenfield plant, from farm to fork, from ranchers to retailers, including some truly innovative processes.

Emydex visited Sustainable Beef-Beef-Plant

Partnership Between Emydex and Sustainable Beef

Shane Hayes, said “we are thrilled to be chosen to partner with Sustainable Beef in this new start up venture in the US. This project’s scope includes many ‘firsts’ from various stakeholders, which makes it a very exciting project to be involved in. After touring the plant and gaining a clear understanding of the vision for this new enterprise, we believe that the term ‘the biggest little plant in the US’ is perfectly fitting.

Emydex pay special thanks to the Sustainable Beef team, especially Kris Smith, Ryan Wagnon for their support and contributions.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to drive forward with this exciting project!

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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A new Dawn for Quality systems

Dawn Meats Group, one of Europe’s leading meat processing companies, sought to streamline its factory-floor Quality Management System with Emydex.

 

Meet the client

Dawn Meats Group is a family-owned business established in 1980 in Waterford, Ireland. The company has grown to become one of the largest and most important beef and sheep processing groups in the industry. The group employs over 8,000 people across twelve countries, including ten sites in Ireland and thirteen in the UK, and exports to over 50 countries worldwide.

Every year, Dawn Meats Group processes over 1 million cattle and 3.5 million sheep, generating more than €2.5 billion in turnover for the company and contributing over €1.67 billion to rural economies through 30,000 farms in Ireland and the UK.

The numbers are staggering, and so is their success.

 

The Opportunity

Dawn Meats developed its own in-house quality management system, which largely relied on manual, paper-based checks throughout its factory floors.

While this was rigorous and helped to maintain the company’s highest quality products, it was inefficient, creating delays, tons of paper, and hours of data entry. The old manual way of working involved lengthy printing, handing out, filling in, returning, checking, countersigning, and storing paper records. On top of that, files had to be physically retrieved in the event of an audit or to trend data.

For the past decade (since 2013), Emydex has been developing an Electronic Quality Management System (EQMS) capable of being used in single plants as well as across multi-plant group processors like Dawn Meats Group

Emydex’s Quality Management System is a software system that allows food processors carry out their factory and food safety quality and audit checks on tablets, reporting instantly in the back-office, replacing all paper-based quality check sheets on the factory floor.

A perfect fit for Dawn Meats Group.

“​We selected Emydex, a long-standing partner of ours, due to Emydex’s understanding of our food production facilities, their excellent software development ability and personal project management delivery,” said Julia Hewerdine, Group Food Safety & Quality Project Manager in Dawn Meats Group.

 

There were several drivers behind Dawn Meats Group’s decision to select Emydex:

 

One System

The first was Emydex gave Dawn Meats Group one single system, with Emydex’s quality module sitting alongside all other Emydex factory floor MES, Production and Warehouse Management modules on one common platform.

“We have worked with Emydex over the past decade on the production and traceability side, so we trust them”, commented John Coleman, Dawn Group Food Safety and Quality Manager.

 

Cloud or On-Premises

The EQMS system can be installed on-premises or in the cloud. Emydex doesn’t force its customers to operate their QMS out of the cloud; they can install it on-prem if necessary.

“Emydex has had a tremendous impact on our shop floor quality data collection on site, as well as safeguarding completion of checks in a scheduled and timely manner.  Its reliability and speed have ensured that workflows carried out have been given full attention, and no corners are cut.” said Alan McCormack, Dawn Meats Technical Team

 

Online and Offline Mode

Another key differentiator is that the system can work offline as well as online for all compatible mobile devices, using local databases. This means operators can switch to offline mode when capturing quality data in areas with poor or zero Wi-Fi coverage.

“Our QA’s like the systems’ ability to save checks within the factory, without needing to return the checks to folders which would previously have occurred. The system’s speed and performance has allowed for more thorough and detailed checks on the line, as well as increasing their time available to carry out additional checks, without needing to carry out tedious admin tasks.”, commented Alan McCormack, Dawn Meats Technical Team.

 

Flexibility

Finally, the system is very configurable in-house including an easy-to-use quality workflow builder tool. This function allows in-house QC personnel (non-IT people) to design and build their own Quality workflows in-house, including QC surveys, QC check-sheets and quality audits.

“I like how their QMS system is flexible, and how we can configure it to how we wanted to work – not something you get with an out-of-the-box solution. This flexibility means we can build our own workflows ourselves, not involving Emydex nor internal IT.” added John Coleman, Dawn Meats Group, Food Safety and Quality Manager.

 

Going Live

The Emydex Quality Management System has been operating in Dawn Meats Group’s Irish & UK facilities for over five years now. Having first gone live in two Irish plants in 2019, today the system is operating in Dawn Meat’s seven primal processing plants in Ireland, as well as a further seven group primal processing plants in the UK, fourteen plants so far, with further roll-outs underway, including three retail processing plants in the UK.

At this point Dawn’s group technical QC team have configured internally almost 500 separate QC workflows in Emydex including for example, Abattoir and Boning Hall pre-op checks, GMP audits, metal detector checks, glass and hard plastic, knife register, and attendance checks etc. Once built centrally, such workflows can then be used across all the group’s sites.

 

The Results

Emydex EQMS helps Dawn Meats Group streamline the QMS processes across its factories and ensure they are working to the most effective QMS system. Standardising the QMS and FSM systems across the group improves compliance and shares best practices throughout all the facilities.

“External auditors have had a positive outlook on the Emydex quality system, frequently commenting on its benefits of generating reports, assigning close-outs, and collating data at a click of a button.” said Alan McCormack, Dawn Meats Technical Team

 

Using the Document Management System included within the system, sites can share generic documents and processes and tailor the specifics to the site. This reduces time lost in writing up documents and figuring out procedures and risk assessments.

The system creates actions, alerts, notifications and alarms in real-time and automatically tells them when they are out of compliance, forcing the immediate implementation of corrective actions.

“The less obvious savings are evident too – less time and effort, fewer mistakes and corrections, reduced hold-ups, etc. I can see if people are making the required quality checks and if they are making them at exactly the right times.” John Coleman, Dawn Group Technical Manager in Ireland

 

It improves compliance and reduces issues in announced and unannounced audits, reducing risk with defective product, product recalls and customer satisfaction.

The Emydex system frees up resources to drive product quality improvements and frees up archive space and storage. It will give central management a holistic view through instant visibility of all factories in one centralised system, making KPI reporting easier and maximising safety, quality and compliance.

“The result is that resources have been freed up. Less paperwork, collection is instant, no errors, less time, no printing, archive space has been freed up, we have instant and easy retrieval of documents – everything has improved and is more accurate.” commented John Coleman, Dawn Group Technical Manager in Ireland

 

Finally, this accurate QMS data can drive operational processes and business decisions, helping continuous improvement by providing instant effect data.

“The Emydex Quality System is an innovative, adaptable software solution which fulfils the needs of Dawn Meats Group and continues to evolve through more areas of our factories, making them fit for the future.”
Julia Hewerdine, Group Food Safety & Quality Project Manager in Dawn Meats Group

 

Don’t wait! Embrace the future of quality management with electronic quality management
software.

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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Silver Fern Farms welcomes Emydex to Fourth Beef plant in Te Aroha, New Zealand

Silver Fern Farms Expands Emydex Integration in Te Aroha

The Silver Fern Farms Emydex implementation continued following successful rollouts of the factory floor MES system in its primary beef processing plants in Belfast, Dargaville, and Hawera. Earlier this month (12/13 October), the fourth beef primal processing plant in Te Aroha, North Island, New Zealand, went live.

Commenting on the go-live, Matt Ballard, Chief Transformation Officer with Silver Fern Farms, said “this deployment went smoothly and the adoption by our frontline teams has been excellent”. 
 

Emydex rollouts are planned to continue in 2025, with the beef processing plants in Finegand and Pacific set to come online with the Emydex for primary processing, production control and traceability reporting.

 

Emydex CEO, David McMahon, added, “A huge thanks to our Emydex team working on the SFF project, including Carne De Vreede, Saffi Muhammed, Ashley Buckle, and Felsi Judith Lawrence in Emydex New Zealand, as well as Carl Brennan in Emydex Australia who flew over to New Zealand to support another successful go-live with no Emydex stoppages.”

 

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 Software: A Game-Changer for Beef Processors

Emydex, a leading provider of software solutions for the meat processing industry, is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2024.

For over two decades, Emydex Beef Processing Software has been transforming how leading meat processors operate across the globe. Trusted by industry leaders like Dawn Meats, Central Agri Group, and Ashbourne Meats, Emydex delivers robust, adaptable solutions that improve efficiency, traceability, and productivity throughout the beef supply chain.

Ashbourne Meats in Ireland, an Emydex customer for eight years, praised the Emydex team for their reliability, friendliness, and professionalism. Donal Houlihan, Operations Manager, said, “The Emydex team have an excellent understanding of the Meat Industry. The system is extremely user-friendly, allowing a smooth working environment across all our production lines. Their technology constantly meets our needs in an ever-evolving industry.” read full story.

 

Central Agri Group in Victoria, Australia, has been an Emydex customer for eight years. The Managing Director, Rami Koyu, commended Emydex for its smooth rollout and the positive response from operators. He said, “The Emydex roll-out was one of the smoothest IT system rollouts I have ever been involved in.” read full story.

 

Dawn Meats Group in Ireland, an Emydex customer for twenty years, praised Emydex for its agility. Shane Slattery, Group CIO, said, “For twenty years, Dawn Meats and Emydex have been in a symbiotic partnership, during which time the Emydex solutions have been able to be quickly adapted to changes within both our industry and business.” read full story.

 

Eurofarm Foods in Ireland, an Emydex customer for fourteen years, commended Emydex for its ‘can-do’ attitude as well as excellent helpdesk support. Ciaran Boyle, General Manager, said, “More recently, Emydex were also there to support our business in the immediate aftermath of a cyber-attack on the business in Sept 2021. This was a phenomenal result to say the least.” read full story.

 

Harvey Beef in Western Australia, an Emydex customer for nine years, praised the Emydex team for their willingness to understand their problems and look at solutions. Mike Stephenson, Head of Technology, said, “The team are great to work with and always willing to understand our problems and look at solutions to improve the way our Emydex is integrated with our business.” read full story.

 

Kepak Group in Ireland & UK, an Emydex customer for seventeen years, commended Emydex for its support in their business growth. Jeremy O’Callaghan, Group CIO, said, “Emydex has been an integral part of the system delivery team for Kepak Group for almost two decades, supporting us in our business growth across multiple sites in both Ireland and the UK.” read full story.

 

Liffey Meats in Ireland, a customer operating Emydex in two of its plants, commended Emydex for its ‘can-do’ attitude. Derek McDermott, Chief Financial Officer, said, “Having worked with Dave and his team for the past fourteen years, I can say the key difference with Emydex is their ‘can do’ attitude.” read full story.

 

MeatCo Namibia, an Emydex customer in Southern Africa for thirteen years, praised Emydex for its fit-for-purpose product. Grant Mitchell, IT Manager: Production Systems, said, “Emydex is a Fit for Purpose product, which complements our Business.” read full story.

 

Silver Fern Farms, operating fourteen plants in New Zealand, has been an Emydex customer for four years, currently operating Emydex in two of its plants with further plant rollouts in progress. Matt Ballard, Chief Transformation Officer, highlighted Emydex’s ability to provide greater traceability and process controls, saying, “Emydex has shown it can provide greater traceability and process controls that are positive in meeting Silver Fern Farms needs over the longer term.” read full story.

 

Wilson Hellaby Ltd, with two plants in New Zealand, has been an Emydex customer for three years. Justin Lee, Chief Financial Officer, commended Emydex’s innovative approach to software development, saying, “In both instances, we were able to employ Emydex’s innovative approach to software development to solve challenges within our industry where off-the-shelf solutions just don’t exist.” read full story.

 

These testimonials from just ten of Emydex’s global beef customers highlight the significant benefits that Emydex software brings to beef processors, including smooth rollouts, greater traceability, innovative solutions, and excellent support. These customers have been working with Emydex for 119 years collectively across 36 plants.

Over the past two years, a dedicated team at Emydex HQ in Dublin, Ireland, has collaborated with numerous longstanding beef processing customers to develop a new Industry Standard software solution for the Beef Processing industry. This Vexillum (Latin for ‘Standard’) project aims to create a comprehensive, ready-to-use Manufacturing Execution System (MES) tailored for beef processors. The initial rollout of this system will be undertaken by four Emydex beef processing customers, deploying it across more than 20 beef primary processing facilities in Ireland and the UK.

As Emydex celebrates its 20th anniversary, it looks forward to continuing to provide top-notch solutions for the beef processing industry.

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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Farmer Bookings & Feedback via Livestock Portal

Farmer Bookings & Feedback via Livestock Portal

A new web-based appointment booking and feedback system, reduces paperwork, facilitates easier appointments, and provides transparent feedback to producers and farmers in real-time and accurately

Feb 2022

The supply of livestock from the producer to the meat processor is underpinned by the consistent supply of livestock of the correct quality, correct inspection and optimal grading of these animals while processing in meat processing factories. This is applicable to Beef, Lamb and Pork/hog producers and processors. 

This relationship can now also be built-upon and strengthened with the use of a transparent data transfer from the processor back to the producers via a new Emdyex web-based appointment booking and feedback system. This is achieved via Emydex standard APIs that interact directly with Emydex factory floor MES Solutions running on Kill lines in Abattoirs and Slaughterhouses around the world. 

 

Animal Health Feedback 

Farmers could have the ability to make bookings and appointments, receive Health feedback information, download their financial information, as well as receive their remittances digitally through the Portal, reducing unnecessary paper documentation and helping both sides work towards their sustainability goals.

To facilitate the seamless exchange of producer/Processor data, Emydex has developed a comprehensive suite of secure web APIs. These are designed to simplify the livestock supply from producer to processor and offer the ability to surface kill line and grade data about the supplied livestock back to the producer.

 

Farmer Appointments & Bookings

Authorised agents and suppliers can book appointments to supply their livestock to the processor directly using the API calls embedded in a web portal which can be run via a web browser on a desktop PC or mobile device. This makes the process of selling livestock to the processor far simpler than initiating a booking via other means, eliminating double handling of data and reducing the opportunity for errors in the process.

The Emydex Supplier WebAPI Module consists of several API endpoints that can be called to perform various operations, such as registering new suppliers and livestock delivery appointments directly within Emydex, providing details of any generated payments and retrieving relevant data collected on the Emydex kill line. 

 

Visibility of Grading & Quality Data

This can include the data from the Emydex veterinary inspection stations, grading data and if applicable data from chiller grading processes (MSA). The data retrieval from the kill line via the APIs can be performed at a per delivery or lot level or down to the individual sides of the carcasses forming part of a particular delivery or lot. This offers much greater visibility of the grading and quality data registered to each carcass by the processor and provides comprehensive feedback to the supplier on the condition of the livestock supplied to the factory. How each carcass was graded informs how each carcass was ultimately priced for payment. This can assist the supplier in improving the quality of supplied livestock to meet the producers’ requirements.

By combining the Emydex Kill Line, Central Animal Payments System and Livestock API modules in one wholistic solution, Beef, Lamb and Pork livestock suppliers and processors can achieve a higher level of digital integration when considering the supply of animals to the plant and also receiving performance feedback on the quality of supply and pricing calculations applied to the delivery.

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Emydex CAPS off year with Livestock Payments System

Emydex CAPS off the year with a new Livestock Settlements System

For most Meat processors, the procurement of raw materials, especially Livestock, is by far the largest variable cost for the business to manage. Therefore, being able to ensure the Accurate andTimely payment for this stock is a key requirement. Many Meatprocessors choose to differentiate themselves from their competitors based on the speed and accuracy of payment to their suppliers. Emydex’s recently redeveloped Central Animal Payment System (CAPS) is designed to meet this requirement specifically, as well as to provide functionality that provides parameter-driven flexibility to meet all current and future requirements.

 

Calculating Animal Settlements

The key to the success of the system is the ability to design animal payment ‘methods’ that can be added to the system as a component to suit individual customer needs without modifying the existing system. This means that if there is a requirement for a new way of paying a supplier, whether it be based on a contract, supply volumes, average market process, or a complex grid-based system, these can be developed and ‘locked in’ to the existing system as a snapshot for later retrieval.

As standard, the Animal Payment System caters to multiple payment grids where any data from the kill floor or kill ‘lot’ (delivery) can be incorporated into multiple axes of a grid to generate a payment.

This might be a weight range and fat score or a meat marbling score and dentition range i.e. virtually any combination of data elements that can be measured as part of livestock processing.

Multiple grids can be used to accumulate values such as a supplementary ‘bonus’ value or to allow a record to pass to a second grid if the criteria for the first grid e.g. a carcass that is too heavy or old for the first payment grid. This ‘fall through’ process can be repeated until a grid that matches is finally found.

 

Cattle Payment Invoicing and Adjustments

The system is capable of producing recipient-created tax invoices (RCTI) for suppliers (farmers), third-party agents, commissioned livestock buyers, transport companies and service or contract kills (an accounts receivable transaction rather than the usual accounts payable).

User-defined adjustments, again using virtually any of the data in the system, can apply adjustments to this invoice to either deduct money for items such as carcass faults, levies, transport costs etc. or apply a rebate such as a ‘skin’ or hide credit. These can be applied automatically using pre-defined ‘settlement schemes’ (groups of adjustments) or added manually on a case-by-case basis.

 

Carcass Costings

As a carcass is produced, the system can calculate the cost for the carcass per kg (or lb) by running each carcass record through the various livestock settlement processes to generate the total cost, so not only is the cost of the purchase from the supplier included but also the cost of freight, commissions etc.

Costs that do not appear on any invoice such as a kill fee can also be included if required. This allows for carcasses to be costed before the payment is finalised so if the carcass is disposed of via a sale or boning process, the cost can be reported as part of the input to the process for accurate costings. Alternatively, carcass costs can be updated once the payment is finalised.

 

Animal Payment Reporting

Invoice and costing data can be updated to an in-house or 3rd party provider ERP or Financial system for payment with full audit trails and costing audits available in the CAPS system. Standard reports are available and data from the payment system can be surfaced using the in-built Emydex Business Intelligence (BI) tool.

Kill data can be from Emydex kill floor systems or up-uploaded from multiple sources and sites to allow for a centralized system for consolidated processing and reporting.

 

Centralised Payments catering for large Enterprises

Given the flexibility and extensibility of the system, current and future needs can easily be met with an ‘out of the box’ system. Once configured the system can generate payments, email all parties involved and update costs and financial systems at the push of a button. Payment processes that would traditionally take hours can be streamlined and the labour requirements significantly reduced.

Accurate costings allow for true profitability costing as the input costs to sales and further processing are readily available.

With the ability to run as a centralised process taking data from many sources, both large enterprises to single site operations can all gain tremendous advantages from the new system.

 

If you want to learn more – contact Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or North America offices.

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