Cold Storage

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

Stock Management

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

Synchronized

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

ERP Integration

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

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

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

Shane Slattery, CIO with Dawn Meats

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

Interfrigo is the largest independent cold store in Northern Ireland, operating a 136,000 sq ft state-of-the-art cold store with storage capacity for 20,000 pallets. Interfrigo provide 3rd party cold storage for a number of local and international food producers including many of Emydex’s food processing customers. Interfrigo looked to Emydex to replace their existing warehousing system back in early 2011.

“As we manage stock on behalf of some large Food Processing companies who also operate Emydex’s Production Management systems in their factories, it made sense for Interfrigo to replace our existing legacy WMS with Emydex’s Warehouse Management Software system” explains Brendan McAlonan, Interfrigo’s Operations Manager. “The Emydex warehousing system provides Interfrigo with all the usual capabilities you would expect to find in a full-blown Warehousing system, but in addition it provides us with real-time electronic links to our customers who are also using Emydex’s factory floor system. The benefit of this is the ability to manage stock transfers and sales order picking requests instantly and accurately”.

Using Emydex’s ‘Intersite-transfers’ feature our customers also running Emydex are able to dispatch and trace shipments into and out of the Interfrigo Cold Store seamlessly. On the Interfrigo side, goods are verified once received, put-away, picked and dispatched all via Emydex, with the ability to break-down and rebuild pallets to fulfil sales orders as required. Emydex were able to enhance their system to also run a version of Emydex on truck-mounted terminals in all our fork-lifts.” The Emydex system is stable and reliable, easy to use, and totally flexible to allow us to create new forms or reports required by the business without any great hassle” added McAlonan.

Following on from the original implementation, Legislative and Customer driven demands have been introduced requiring the management and reporting of food allergens contained within any food products stored in the Cold Storage facilities. Emydex have further extended their warehousing system to capture and report on the details of any specific allergens contained within every product stored on behalf of Interfrigo customers.

Using Emydex, Interfrigo now electronically record details as to which food products contain allergens such as milk, eggs, wheat, peanuts, shellfish and soybeans etc. whether in powder, liquid or solid form. Once Allergen details have been captured and recorded electronically in Emydex, this allows Interfrigo to review options around storage and put-away to ensure foods containing certain Allergens are stored separately from those without. It also means dispensing with and manual paper-based food allergen control systems, and allows for the instant and accurate reporting on the food allergen status for all food stocks stored within the cold stores.
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990