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Turning over a new leaf in New Zealand

Turning over a new leaf in New Zealand

How Emydex helped the largest livestock processing company in New Zealand to replace a 25-year-old Abattoir system with a new state-of-the-art solution that worked so well, it’s planned to go into 13 other facilities. The pilot operation in Christchurch was originally scheduled for a three-week installation but was up and running in just four days. However, the conversation with Silver Fern Farms started over a decade ago, the tendering process was exhaustive, and preparation and simulation reached a whole new level of precision.

 

Meet the client

Silver Fern Farms is the largest livestock processor in New Zealand with a 30% market share, 7,000 employees working across 14 plants and a turnover of NZ$ 2.7b. They represent 16,000 sheep, cattle, and deer farmers, exporting to 60 countries worldwide. The Silver Fern Farms headquarters is in the centre of Dunedin on the South Island.

Emydex has been working on a deal with Silver Fern Farms since 2010 which makes this the longest sales cycle in the company’s history. Over the course of the 10-year discussions, the Emydex team paid several visits to Silver Fern Farm’s head-office in Dunedin, as well as processing plants across New Zealand, and various delegations from Silver Fern Farms travelled to Ireland to visit Emydex at their head-office in Dublin, as well as Emydex customer plants in Ireland and the UK.

 

The opportunity

In 2019, Silver Fern Farms informed Emdyex that they were ready to start a formal project to replace their ageing factory floor traceability and production control system systems. The pilot plant was to be their primal beef processing facility in Belfast, Christchurch which had been using the same system for 25 years.

As part of the formal tender process Emydex pitched against two other international specialist firms, as well as a local supplier of MES software systems. The pitch process comprised a comprehensive selection process that included two days of presentations and meetings, involving demonstrations of nine scripted scenarios (traceability, packing, etc) over seven hours before thirty people from the Silver Fern Farm’s group, followed by a second day of meetings with their internal IT team as well as their engineering department. In the end Emydex emerged as the preferred supplier and were awarded the contract for a beef primal processing pilot project in their Belfast plant in Christchurch.

 

What we did

The project was originally planned to go live in July 2020 when the Belfast plant traditionally closed for a 3-week period, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought everything to a halt. Due to the pandemic, the project was moved back by a year. In that time, the project scope expanded to include other technical aspects for delivery for example, a whole new system for animal assembly.

The new Emydex system configured for Silver Fern Farm’s handles everything from the booking and intake of the animals and follows the flow through the factory floor including the stun station, live weight, head inspections, carcass inspections, reinspection, and grading. Everything meets the strictest New Zealand government veterinarian standards and procedures, and it all integrates with the existing CRS system for streamlined payment processing.

 

 

Automation was a big part of the project, replacing the factory floor terminals with integration to their programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Each hook has an identification on the hook and the system collects information at every station along the line.

“Automation like this is the main difference we see between the European and the Australian and New Zealand markets. The level of investment in automation is higher but it pays back in labour efficiencies – machines don’t catch COVID.”

James Grennan, Technical Director, Emydex

 

Going live

The project finally went live in November 2021 following a comprehensive testing and training schedule for all operatives that included simulations, dry runs, full monitoring of everything at all stages and then an Emydex team onsite. The client anticipated a three-week switch-over, but the joint teams managed to complete switch-over in just four days.

 

 

The Belfast plant operates two shifts, producing 20-hours a day which makes it a very busy plant. Emydex supports the plant at all times, 24x7, with a team of Emydex engineers spread across New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, and Canada, following the sun.

 

“From our support offices in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and Canada we can follow the sun so that should anyone in Silver Fern Farms have an issue, they can call Emydex on just one number and there will be someone at their desk to take their call and, if it’s a critical issue, it’s a sequential line, downtime can cost thousands of dollars a minute. We can analyse and resolve immediately 24 hours a day with our four teams around the world.”

Lorna Daly, Head of PMO, Emydex

 

Emydex today have a team of five people employed in New Zealand and ten in the Emdyex Australia office in Brisbane, supporting Silver Fern Farms as well as two other New Zealand food processing companies. This makes Emdyex the largest Irish employer of permanent staff in New Zealand, according to Enterprise Ireland, for whom Emdyex are a client company. In fact, the introduction of Emydex to Silver Ferns Farms originally came via Enterprise Ireland’s Australia office, through one of their market-office staff based in New Zealand.

 

“Enterprise Ireland have been a huge help to Emdyex in Australia and New Zealand. The EI Australasia team are so supportive of Emydex and other Irish companies, it’s reassuring to know we have these local supports in place for whenever we need them”

David McMahon, CEO, Emydex

 

The results

As you would expect, the new Emydex system has brought new levels of efficiency and productivity to the Silver Fern Farms facility in Belfast, Christchurch. What is so impressive is that this was a very efficient and well-run operation even before we went near it but soon after go-live, Silver Fern Farms confirmed that they had processed more cattle in one shift than they had ever done before and finished earlier too.

 

“The project went well. Emydex is a great system and the staff love using it. The system gives good information and reports, it is easy to use and works well. There are efficiencies in that all the data is in the one area, and we no longer have to review or get reports in more than one system to get the information we want. Staff on the floor, as well as leaders and management have benefitted the most when it comes to information and reports that the Emydex system can supply. Their engineers and technical people are very good; their project managers are very knowledgeable and able to keep us informed” 

Phillip William Kilgour, Plant Manager, Silver Fern Farms

 

“Bringing all different systems into one system will have benefits. This means one system for our end-to-end site process - from livestock booking through to container load-out to the customer. Talking to some of the workers they like the new Emydex system and it has helped them”

Shaun O’Neill, Regional Operations Manager, Silver Fern Farms

 

“Feedback from Belfast has been very positive, and it’s great to have all site functions in one system as well as having timely access to important information for decision making.”

Simon Limmer, CEO, Silver Fern Farms

 

What’s next?

Based on the success of the pilot project, Silver Fern Farms have accelerated their plan to roll out Emydex to their 13 other processing plants spread across New Zealand. In 2022, the plan in Phase 2 is to tackle Production Scheduling, Packing, Automatic Labelling along with implementation of Emydex’s Enterprise Management System (EMS) for Master Data. The EMS system will be used to centrally manage data from the head office to individual plants. In conjunction with Phase 2, additional teams will make any adaptions needed the existing Livestock processing system required to roll out to other bovine sites and then move onto implementation of the ovine and venison systems.

 

In other’s words

“In terms of their professionalism… as a meat processing company Silver Ferns employ project managers, process managers, business analysts as well as internal QA testers. They installed their own Emydex training lab and ran the kill line with dry runs using big blue plastic barrels (blue cows) hanging from the hooks to simulate carcasses. This level of attention to detail was impressive to see. Emydex are a better company for the experience we had working with Silver Fern Farms.”

David McMahon, CEO Emydex

 

“One of the biggest and hopefully unique issues with this project was that our team members on the ground had to travel from outside NZ and so quarantine for two weeks in advance of the go live. There was a lottery for the MIQ quarantine places, and it was tough waiting for when the places opened. Even close to the go live flight cancellations caused some issues with our team having to travel long hours by car. Due to COVID, Emydex has adapted to not having the full team onsite for the launch with team members working remotely. The team worked via video calls and cameras were installed to give a view of the factory floor. We had easy access to remotely control each terminal.”

Shane Hayes, Product Manager, Emydex

 

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Improvements by the country mile

How traditional, community-oriented company Ashbourne Meat Processors embraced change through Emydex

Meet the client

Ashbourne Meat Processors is one of Ireland’s most successful exporters of premium chilled beef products. Founded in 1985, the company exports high quality products all over the world and is proud to be recognised as a family whose expertise and knowledge is passed down from one generation to another. There are nearly 200 people in the company family working in two facilities in the centre of Ireland – Roscrea (slaughtering and cold-storage facilities) and Naas (deboning and cold storage).

Ashbourne Meat Processors is a firm believer in leveraging advanced technology and production facilities.

The opportunity

Ashbourne Meat Processors’ two plants were essentially working in isolation from each other on outdated systems that required a lot of manual input and data entry. The abattoir in Roscrea would take in livestock and create the relevant paperwork. When the carcases were transferred to Ashbourne Meat Processors’ facility in Naas (and to other facilities operated by the company’s clients all over the country), new paperwork would have to be created. This was extremely inefficient and left the company open to human error, duplication and lack of visibility and control.

There were also issues with compliance as the legacy systems used in both operations were not integrated with the Department of Agriculture systems and so there was a need for even more data entry.

“One of the biggest problems is we didn’t have integration with the Department of Agriculture. We knew we had to move on, to integrate and put all of this technology to work for us. Emydex came on board and handled everything. 95% of the carcasses go from Naas to Roscrea and all the paperwork is now electronic and automatic and we can monitor everything remotely which, as the pandemic has proved, is more important than it was.”
PJ Butler, Roscrea Plant Manager

What we did

Emydex is the acknowledged leader when it comes to process development for the food industry and when Ashbourne Meat Processors decided to overhaul the IT infrastructure and embrace the latest processing technology, they called Emydex.

Following a project scoping exercise, the team agreed to divide the job into two phases – one for the slaughter plant in Roscrea and the other for the Deboning operation in Naas. Connecting the two facilities was an obvious but important improvement.

In phase one, The Naas Deboning operation was upgraded by Emydex to deliver an end-to-end factory floor solution. Today Emydex handles the entire processing procedures within this plant, from Intake, Into / Out of Boning, Packing, Dispatch and Warehousing. Emydex also generates all the appropriate Dispatch Documentation, transfers traceability data to customers and allows for full forward and backward traceability. Prior to Emydex’s introduction, Work Orders were paper-based and were phoned down to the operators. Now this is all controlled within Emydex which means there is less likelihood of human error and the whole process is now more streamlined and controlled.

In phase two, the abattoir and cold storage facility 100 kilometres away in Roscrea, County Tipperary, was completely overhauled with everything from animal intake, supplier POs, inter-company paperwork and all procedures – from processing to packing, including sales picking – newly streamlined and automated. Labelling from boning through storage and out in orders was part of the specification as was the automatic electronic generation of all documentation. Real-time data is now updated constantly between the two plants and a new dispatch system created.

Going Live

Emydex systems went live in Naas in January 2019 and Roscrea in October 2019.

The results

Animal intake at the abattoir is now seamlessly and automatically integrated with the Government’s veterinary body, AIMS. Ear tags are scanned and all animal data is confirmed and registered and the Department of Agriculture is notified automatically. This improvement alone saves thousands of man hours every year and completely eliminates human error at the intake point.

“The old system was labour-intensive and setting up jobs needed a lot of work. Emydex brought in a lot of standardisation which has helped us to complete jobs quicker, weigh boxes quicker and see yields a lot clearer. We became 8% more efficient overnight… we highly recommend Emydex.”
Donal Houlihan, Naas Plant Manager, Ashbourne Meat Processors.

There used to be two separate systems and all sorts of mistakes were created by so much manual data entry. This led to delays in cattle payments and problems in registering the passport details of some animals. Now there is just one system and those errors have been eliminated.

Everything from animal intake to carcass dispatch and box generation is automated, tacked, reported and visible all the way from start to finish.

Overall, and almost immediately, efficiency was improved, paperwork virtually eliminated, errors drastically reduced, and profitability increased throughout the company.

In other's words

“The savings in administration were immediate – we saved a labour unit in the office immediately – and the piles of paperwork and stacks of files are a thing of the past. We’re almost paperless now, except for the cheques which some of our more traditional farming suppliers prefer over electronic payments. I estimate that actual physical paperwork has decreased by 95% and that’s a huge achievement.”
PJ Butler, Roscrea Plant Manager, Ashbourne Meat Processors

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A new day at Dawn Meats

Dawn Meats is an outstandingly successful meat processing group. When they wanted to streamline their quality management system on the factory floors, they turned to Emydex

Meet the client

Dawn Meats is a family owned business that was established in Waterford, Ireland in 1980 and has grown to become one of the largest and most important beef and sheep processing groups in the industry. The group employs over 7,000 people in dozens of countries, including 10 sites in Ireland and 12 in the UK, exporting to over 50 countries worldwide.

Every year, Dawn Meats processes over 1 million cattle and 3 million sheep, generating more than €2 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 their own in-house quality management system which largely relied upon manual, paper-based checks all along their factory floors.

While this was rigorous and helped to maintain the very highest levels of quality products for the company, it was inefficient, creating delays, tons of paper, hours of data entry and leaving the door open for error. The old manual way of working involved lengthy printing, handing out, filling in, returning, checking, countersigning and storage of paper records. On top of that, files had to be physically retrieved in the event of audit.

“Dawn Meats wanted to do away with paper-based quality checks along the floor and to use the data they collect in a far more efficient manner to drive improvements. They wanted a quality management system that would create actions and alerts automatically, so that managers could see in real time what has been done. This would mean they could make more informed decisions and corrective actions, improve compliance and reduce issues.”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO

Since 2013, Emydex have being developing their Quality Management System capable of being used in single site as well as across multi-site Group processors like Dawn Meats. Emydex’s Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) is, in short, a software system that allows food processors carry out their factory and supplier 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.

What we did

There were five main drivers behind Dawn Meats decision to select Emydex 

The first was Emydex gave them a single system, with our quality module sitting alongside all other Emydex factory floor Production or Warehousing modules on a common platform.

Next, our solution can be fully integrated to shop floor industrial machinery, capable of scanning barcodes, meaning no manual keying of data needed. 

Thirdly, the Emydex EQMS system can be installed on-premise or in the cloud. Emydex don’t force customers to operate their QMS out of the cloud, they can install on-prem if required. 

Another key differentiator is the system can work off-line as well as on-line for all compatible mobile devices, using local databases. Meaning operators can switch to off-line mode when capturing quality data in areas with poor or zero wi-fi coverage. 

Finally, the system is very configurable in-house including an easy to use QC 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, without the need to involve either Emydex developers or their internal IT department.

Going Live

The Emydex EQMS system has been running in at Dawn Meats Irish facilities in both Rathdowney and Carroll’s Cross plants for a number of months. 

At this point Dawn’s group technical QC team have configured internally almost 200 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. Having completed site testing over the past number of weeks, the system is currently being rolled out to Dawn’s remaining processing plants in Ireland including Grannagh, Ballyhaunis, Charleville and Kilbeggan.

The results

Emydex EQMS helps Dawn Meats to streamline the QMS processes across their factories and to ensure they are working to the most effective QMS system. As it standardises the QMS and FSM systems across the group it improves compliance and shares best practice throughout all of the facilities. 

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.

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 also 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 that maximises safety, quality and compliance. 

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

In other's words

Speaking shortly after the Emydex system go-live in Dawn’s second site at Carroll’s Cross, John Coleman, Dawn Group Technical Manager in Ireland said,

“The result is that resources have been freed up, saving cost. 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. 

We got what we wanted which is improved collection, visibility and use of our data. That instant visibility means we have real-time situation reports. The tangible savings are obvious – less paper and less ink, for example. 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.”

Working with Emydex has been great - they understand their system and have been very helpful. Emydex created a system for support that includes excellent on-going communication. We have worked with them over the past decade on traceability, and so we trusted them. I like how their QMS system is so flexible, and how they could configure it to how we wanted to work – not something you get with an out-of-the-box solution. That flexibility meant that we were given artistic license as to how to develop our own workflows.

John Coleman 

Dawn Group Food Safety and Quality Manager 

What’s next?

The next phase is roll out Emydex’s EQMS to all 8 Dawn Meats factories in Ireland. Over 2020 the system will be introduced to Dawn’s sites in the UK.

 

For more on Emydex's Quality Management system, read:

Electronic Quality Management Systems for the Food Industry


or contact Sales in any of our Dublin, Brisbane, South Africa or Toronto offices

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When an innovator works in partnership with a leader

What happens when an innovator works in partnership with a leader.

A new Emydex system has helped production run a lot smoother for Danish Crown subsidiary KLS Ugglarps in Hörby, Sweden

A blue-chip client

When Danish Crown approached Emydex about designing and implementing a kill line system on a pilot basis for their plant in Hörby, naturally we were very interested in talking to them.

After all, Danish Crown is one of Europe’s largest meat processing companies and the world’s largest pork exporter. As a group it is involved in a long list of other food products with subsidiaries that include a number of very well-known names in the industry: Friland, KLS Ugglarps, Scan-Hide, Tulip Food Company, Tulip Ltd (UK), Sokolow, Dat-Schaub, ESS-FOOD and WestCrown.

Danish Crown was established in 1887 by Denmark’s first co-operative meat company and today has market access to more than 130 countries around the world. It has sites spread across 10 countries in mainland Europe, the UK and most recently China. Working with this blue-chip organisation presented a great opportunity for Emydex.

The pilot site

The pilot site was the operation in Hörby, Sweden and the brief was to create a modern factory floor IT system that was both highly-configurable and flexible that Danish Crown could potentially roll out across multiple production sites within the group

A challenge for Danish Crown was that through acquisition of processing plants around the globe, their factories use various software solutions of different origin and version, which were difficult to for their Global IT team to manage, as they weren’t integrated, and so some factories were not running as efficiently as they could be.

How we approached it

We assembled a project team of Emydex solution engineers and managers working in Dublin and Danish Crown’s central IT team working in Denmark and they collaborated to commission and configure a state-of-the-art Emydex software solution for the Hörby plant.

The new system featured a number of Emydex modules including Beef and Lamb Kill Line, Primary Packing and Processing, Yield Reporting, Carcass Management and Order Processing/ ERP Integration.

One of the more important elements we had to include was integrating with the Swedish Central Animal Database (CDB) which enables files sent by the government listing every live beef animal to be imported into Emydex. When animals are entered at the stables as they arrive at the factory, their ear tags can be validated against the central database.

Going live

We were ready to launch phase one within 5 months of contract signing, and in January 2019 the collective team from Ireland and Denmark met at the Swedish plant, to prepare for and go-live with the new Emydex system. The implementation went very smoothly thanks to rigorous testing and preparation.

The results

Hörby now has a robust factory floor solution and the most immediate result has been increased productivity for KLS Ugglarps and Danish Crown. “With the new Emydex system one of the added benefits is that it enables vet inspections all along the kill line in real-time. Hide processing has increased visibility and carcass intake is smoother via ASN or parse barcodes which eliminates onerous data entry” said Shane Hayes, Business Analyst/Technical Sales with Emydex

In other’s words

Speaking shortly after the Emydex system go-live in Hörby, Henrik Frøsig, Director, Solutions & Innovation, Global IT, Danish Crown commented,

“From day one we were able to slaughter and process more animals than usual. The kill line didn’t stop as it usually might, and everything was more stable and more efficient from the get-go. Our operators are very pleased with the solution… it has a nice interface and does its job very well. They didn’t need much training at all because the screen tells everyone what they need to do and when.

Efficiency and ease of use is why I recommended it to our other facilities around the world. Plus Emydex service is very good, they react very well to our requests and are getting better and better at what they do as they scale up with us. They listen, respond and react and that’s why we are taking them out of the pilot phase and into our group operations worldwide.

(It is) a good system with a great overview with all the information we need at our fingertips. Inventory overview, for example, is now an easy thing for everyone to see immediately. Emydex gives us data we never really had access to and that means innovation and growth is coming to us too, bringing maturity to our own factory here.”

What’s next?

The next stage of the project will include rolling out the Hörby solution to the other six sites in Sweden and then approach Danish Crown’s global network of sites.

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Harvey Beef live with Emydex in Western Australia

In operation since 1919, Harvey Beef is located in the town of Harvey, south of Perth in Western Australia. Part of Harvest Road Group and privately owned by the Minderoo Group, Harvey Beef is Western Australia’s leading beef processor. Stretching across 1.2 million hectares of pastoral farmland, Minderoo cattle stations are dedicated to producing high quality beef for both domestic and export consumption.

Harvey Beef were previously using a legacy factory floor software system comprising a number of software modules including data capture, labelling and 3rd party barcode scanning, that were integrated to their back-office Microsoft Dynamics Nav ERP system.

Full end-to-end Factory Floor Processing System

Due to the aging of the current system, difficulty of upgrading, and rapid growth within the business, a review was undertaken to determine the best course regarding their future IT systems, whether to upgrade or invest in a new system. Opting for the latter option Harvest Road, in December 2017, invited Emydex 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.

The key objective of the project was to deliver an integrated system where data is entered only once, with users having access to real time, accurate inventory. Visibility of information across the organisation, along with visibility of stock produced to orders and availability of stock for dispatch, were all key requirements. The system also needed to be able to support new and changing business requirements, increase productivity, reduce inefficiency, and facilitate options for automation and cost savings.

Front row (L-R) - Ian Carson, Emydex Australia, Heather Humphreys, the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, & Wayne Shaw, General Manager Harvey Beef, signing contracts. Back row (L-R) Kevin Sherry Executive Director Enterprise Ireland and David Eccles, Director Enterprise Ireland A/NZ, were present in Australia for the signing.

The project schedule was spread over five separate phases covering Cattle Processing Line and Payments, Boning Hall and Finger Scanning, Warehouse Management and Nav Integration, Retail Ready and Production Planning.

Kill Line and Payments

Phase one went live in June 2018 and comprised Kill Line and Payments including Livestock Delivery. This automated process allows livestock to enter through an RFID gate and to be scanned into the Emydex kill line system. NVD (National Vendor Declaration) details are recorded and links lot details to appointments, providing traceability and consistency of data from appointments through to grading and payments.

Commenting soon after the kill line go-live in June 2018, Wayne Shaw, General Manager of Harvey Beef said “I think we can say the kill line go-live went pretty well. On week 1, we achieved within 100 head of our maximum capacity which is a good effort for a change this big. The staff are very positive with the result. Everyone can see it is a better system. By weeks end the system was having no negative impact on throughput speed with the kill line system operating at speed, and operators up to speed with using it. Overall a great outcome.”

Boning Hall System

Work on Phase two of the Emydex project commenced soon after, with a subsequent go-live in September 2018, that consisted of Boning Hall, covering Carcass Management and Packing & Processing.  As part of this implementation phase BRI (Boning Room Input) delivers better control over which carcases go into each Boning Work Order (WO). The WO has a set of Rules each carcass must adhere to to be eligible for the Work Order. This gives more control to the planner on what is required for the Work Order.

Warehouse Management and Dispatch

Most recently Phase three of the project, the largest phase of functionality delivered to date, went live in January 2019 and included Warehouse Management, Dispatch as well as Dynamics Nav 2018 Integration. This project phase also delivered intake of third-party raw materials, transfer between internal entities in Harvest Road, transfer out to Cold Stores, and the ability for the Cold Store to dispatch on behalf of Harvest Road. It also included BSM (Buy, Sell, Move) integration, reducing manual entry for producing export documentation.

Commenting on the Phase 3 Go-Live,Wayne Shaw from Harvest Road said  “The feedback has been positive. The rollout has gone better than expected, and I have had a lot of positive comments about functionality being really good. BSM Integration is saving a lot of time that previously was spent manually entering information into BSM, so the integration back and forth between the two systems has saved a lot of time and is a real plus. The scanning inventory in real-time has meant that stocks are correct, which is also saving on average, four hours a day. The feedback on the sales functionality is very positive, with users saying it has exceeded expectations. So well done. The team has done a great job.”

Upcoming Phases

The next phase of the Emydex project beginning shortly, is Retail Ready, which will see the Emydex Retail Packing Software module being implemented. This will be followed by the final phase, Production Planning, which will begin later in the year.

Commenting on the project phases delivered to date, Lorna Daly, Head of Emydex Australia operations said “Following the Emydex roll-outs over the course of 2018 and early 2019, Harvest Road today have a robust end-to-end Factory Floor data capture system that delivers data on-time and accurately. They have more control over data going through the kill line as data is consistent between appointments, delivery and graded information. Real time data for inventory, yields and market pricing, allows for better decision making and view of stock coming close to being out of date. This has led to increased confidence in key metrics, such as stock on hand. Staff now have a modern system and direct access to data, meaning Traceability reports are easy and quick to run.”

 

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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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