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SunPork scales new heights

How Emydex helped SunPork expand their Swickers Kingaroy operation to become the biggest, fastest, highest quality pork processing operation in Australia.

Meet the client

Through Swickers Kingaroy, SunPork is the largest pig processor in all of Australia, handling 900,000 pigs every year to produce 18% (42 million kilos) of the nation’s pork. The group is proud to be Australian farmer-owned and a direct employer of 1,400 people across the country.

In addition to the domestic market, SunPork exports 7 million kilos of pork to seven other countries and creates 140 million meals worldwide annually. They do this through 37 Australian farms in three states and six New Zealand farms on the two islands. They also have three feed-mills, a directly owned abattoir, major interest in a second facility, as well as two value-add facilities.

The opportunity

Following the rebuild of the Export Boning Room after a fire at SunPorks’s Swickers abattoir in Queensland, the group began an additional AUD$ 64m (Euro €40m) investment in a new state-of-the-art facility in 2016. It set out to become the most efficient pork processing line in Australia with a capacity to process up to 750 pigs per hour, whilst maintaining a relentless focus on quality.

In December 2019, the SunPork Group completed the Swickers abattoir expansion in Kingaroy, located three hours outside Brisbane, Queensland, creating more than 200 jobs in the process.

“Over the past 18 months Swickers has constructed the most advanced pork abattoir in Australia, and certainly one of the best in the world. Many producers and wholesalers will rely on the efficiency and quality standards in our plant to maintain and develop their business well into the future. This facility is a cornerstone of the SunPork business and we now have foundations that will underpin our long-term growth strategies.”

Dr Robert van Barneveld, SunPork Group CEO and Managing Director

So how do you become the fastest and most efficient pork processing facility in the country? You bring in one of the world’s leading providers of factory floor software for food processors. You bring in Emydex.

What we did

The Sunpork project began with the design and development of a new state-of-the-art, fully automated kill line system for the Swickers processing plant, in line with Smart Manufacturing (Industry 4.0) best practice. 

The main goal of this project was to interface the Emydex MES to an automated factory floor system consisting of a network of RFID readers and sensors, as well as multiple (20) in-line automated machines, connected to Emydex via the PLC layer. This meant integrating with equipment supplied by Frontmatec, Denmark, that included a carcass opener, automated splitting, AutoFom grader and a carcass stamp printer. 

Other equipment included a PorkScan grader, automatic track scales as well as LED/Light and gate control systems, in addition to other devices to manage routing. The use of multiple real-time vet inspection and grading stations also controlled the flow and routing of carcasses.

RFID integration required the design and build of standard integrations (APIs) to interact with RFID tracking systems on the kill floor. The RFID system provides real-time carcass identification and tracking, enabling full traceability of the carcass throughout processing.

As part of the project, the Emydex engineering team also designed and built a new centralised communication service, called the Data Communication Interface (DCI). DCI eliminates the need for individual terminals to have direct communication with the various integrated hardware and allows terminals to receive the data input in a unified format via this single central communication point. 

The project also delivered additional new innovative systems for stock delivery and pen management, automated carcass routing and an automated chiller sortation system based on configurable business rules.

Going Live

The system began commissioning at the SunPork Swickers plant in July 2019.

The results

The effects were immediate, and the system keeps improving day by day.

“The new kill line is significantly more efficient than the previous line, and it will continue to improve as we move forward. Manpower has reduced in terms of two shifts to one, while the new floor will allow us double output. There are two real and obvious benefits that Emydex has brought to SunPork. One, we have more data points where we can collect manufacturing information from around the floor and two; we have replaced many manual tasks such as populating spreadsheets.

Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary

“What makes the Swickers plant unique is that it not only processes product on behalf of SunPork, but also provides a service kill for other companies in the pork industry and so had to have a lot of flexibility not usually found in normal processing facilities. The need to meet the requirements of each customer utilising the service provided by the plant meant Emydex had to deliver a system that could not only operate at very high speed, but also deliver the ability to change the way each customer’s pigs were prepared and to signal this in real-time to the operators on the production floor”

Ian Carson, Technical Sales Director, Emydex Australia

What’s next?

The next phase is to refine and perfect Emydex’s ‘Factory of The Future system’ on the ground at Swickers and then roll Emydex systems out to further processing functions at Kingaroy and SunPork’s other facility in Queensland.

In other’s words

“We gave Emydex a very tough ask to design and build a system for a kill floor that itself had not even been physically designed yet. Many other system developers would have walked away at various points in the project when things got tough but Emydex regularly went above and beyond the call of duty and I have huge respect for them for that. Their guys were out here working seven days a week and were as invested, committed as we were. It was a new world for both of us and I can’t fault them at all.”

Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary

“The Emydex team has been superb… from the beginning showing a willingness to understand the requirements and design a custom solution for us… (there are) different demands here in Australia to those plants in Europe. The difference it has made has been terrific: for example, we used to have two data collection points on the kill floor and now we have 20. The throughput was 300 pigs per hour and now we’re processing between 700 -750 per hour. The value the Emydex team is adding is fantastic. Support is brilliant, with clear concise and well-presented analysis of issues reported, coupled with mitigation, solutions and actions to monitor and implement fixes. Live dashboards will broadcast information to the right people throughout the group worldwide in real-time. We’re very happy to be working with them and would recommend Emydex to any manufacturer anywhere.

Iestyn Thomas, Group IT Manager, Sunpork Group

I would absolutely recommend Emydex because they have invested their time and resources in our business… it means as much to them as it does to us. Some of their guys came out and spent a month working at the coal face and we couldn’t ask for more commitment than that.

Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary

 

For more on Emydex’s Products, or contact Sales in any of our Dublin, Brisbane, South Africa or Toronto offices

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Emydex North America Market Update

Emydex Technology, a Dublin company specialising in Traceability Software for the food processing industry, have secured its third customer in the North American market. This contract brings to 120 the number of processing plants using Emydex software worldwide, in 14 countries. The company secured its first North American contract in Canada two years ago with pork processor Donald’s Fine Foods and has since closed a deal with Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco).

Emydex was established in 2004 by co-founders James Grennan and Redmond Burke to offer fish and pork producers and food processors an integrated production management system tailored to their needs.

Now led by chief executive David McMahon, Emydex employs more than 50 people at its Dublin headquarters and overseas offices in Canada, Australia and South Africa. The company’s factory- floor software is aimed primarily at large-scale processors. The software combines production control with traceability and quality reporting, yield analysis, stock and food safety management.

“We’ve now moved into the Saas (software as a service) space,” said McMahon.

“We are very focused on our three export markets: Africa, Australia and North America.

“We have spent 12 years developing solutions for 60 customers, with 120 plants around the world, and the question then became ‘what else do they need from us?’.

“We’ve spent the last two years building an online quality management system and that’s been really successful. We then went back to our customers with ten other products we were thinking of building and asked them ‘how interested are you?’.

“They came back and offered to help us with design and testing. So, we’re now working on three new products, two of which are Saas, for group production planning group animal payments and Factory of the Future.”

An export-led company, Emydex has customers in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Namibia. The firm targets countries with strong meat exports, a relatively low concentration of large-scale processors and a strong regulatory framework for food traceability.

Emydex is a client company of state agency Enterprise Ireland. “They have helped us with R&D grants for new product development and internationalisation grants to help market entry into our key new markets,” said McMahon.

Written by Elaine O’Regan – Sunday Business Post

The Business Post

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Emydex installed in Ireland’s Largest Pig Processor

Rosderra Irish Meats Group is the largest pork processing company in Ireland. The group processes over 1.5m pigs per annum across their two state-of-the-art processing facilities at Edenderry, Co. Offaly and Roscrea, Co. Tipperary. In addition, Rosderra have a specialty Meat Ingredients facility in Clara, Co. Offaly, a Pork-Curing facility in Jamestown Co. Leitrim, and a Cooked Meats facility in Stradone, Co. Cavan.

Rosderra approached Emydex in 2015 with a view to replacing their existing traceability and production control systems operating across the group that were approaching end-of-life. After winning a competitive tender process, Emydex was awarded the contract to supply a new factory floor data capture IT solution that operates door-to-door across the group’s four main operating plants. All production processes were to be covered including weighbridge integration, lairage, grading, primal deboning, further processing, packing, order picking and dispatch, as well as stock, yield management and traceability reporting.

Split into eight distinct project phases, the project also included implementation of Emydex’s Cold Store system into Rosderra’s Cold Store facility in Jamestown, as well as tight integration to third party warehouse management systems operating in external cold stores utilised by Rosderra’s production plants.

As part of the initial project phases, Emydex worked with Rosderra’s IT integration partner to build robust interfaces to the group’s SAP system. Integration points were built using AS2 and XML transfer files to allow Emydex to pull products, materials and customer files from SAP, as well as Customer Sales orders destined for both Rosderra production sites as well as 3rd party cold stores, and later to send updated Stock data back to SAP for stock valuation and available-to-promise purposes.

After completing the roll-out of Emydex’s Packing and Warehouse Management systems to Rosderra’s four operating plants in early 2016, the focus shifted to the Boning Hall operations in both Edenderry and Roscrea. These project phases included implementation of Emydex’s boning hall systems for cutting, boning, further processing, Yield Control. Yield Reporting from Emydex includes Carcass chill loss, Cutting yield, chill loss/cutting summary and Boning Hall yield reports.

Presently the project is in final phase, that covers the Abattoir operations at both Edenderry and Roscrea including a centralised slaughter plan and livestock appointments system, weigh-bridge integration, lairage bookings, bulk sequencing as well as detained and pig grading stations. Reporting will include a real-time slaughter line monitor program that will accurately display the status of the slaughter with analysis by lot. Slaughter line analysis can be displayed in both tabular and graphical reporting formats.

Commenting on the project, David McMahon, Emydex CEO said “we are now well into the final stages of a two-year Emydex systems roll-out across the Rosderra group, covering door-to-door processes as well as integrations to back-office ERP, 3rd party cold stores and suppliers as well as factory floor machinery. Looking back over the two years, the project has run smoothly. Both the Emydex and Rosderra project teams worked well together, to plan and deliver each project phase on schedule and without any major disruption to operations. Rosderra are now I believe reaping the benefits of having a robust factory floor data capture Production control system installed, with Emydex providing group and plant managers and supervisors with real-time and accurate reporting on their Production Yields, Stocks and Traceability.”

Louis Ennis, Rosderra Group Finance and Emydex project sponsor, added “Rosderra Irish Meats Group chose Emydex as an end to end solution to replace our legacy system. The installation which is currently on-going will be completed over multi phases across multi sites, with all implementations running smooth and minimum disruption to the business. The first implementation was the warehouse and packing modules and through added interfaces with our ERP system brought immediate benefit to the business through greater visibility on orders, improved data validation and reduced administration especially around our cold store loads where manual input has been greatly reduced. Overall the system greatly improved real time information and offers ease of use and improved flexibility when making changes”

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Oliver Carty improves financial management with Simply Dynamics

Oliver Carty Brand
Simply Dynamics improves financial management for Ireland’s largest bacon producer

  • ERP solution from Simply Dynamics enabling 50% time reduction to run financial reports for Oliver Carty
  • 40% reduction in time to complete cheque run process for finance department
  • Robust EDI inbound and outbound message management

Dublin, 26th February 2013 – Simply Dynamics, a leading provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, today announced that it has implemented an ERP solution for Irish pork, bacon and rasher producer Oliver Carty. The new solution is supporting the company’s on-going expansion and providing them with greater visibility and management of key financial functions.

The Simply Dynamics engagement with Oliver Carty has a contract to the value of €80,000.

After a site visit and analysis of their existing systems, Emydex proposed to implement their replacement Production Management system in two initial project phases.

Oliver Carty is a family run Irish business located in Athlone and is one of Ireland’s largest producers of bacon. It currently has 140 employees which increases substantially at different times of the year to meet seasonal demand and has a turnover of €45 million. Oliver Carty supplies a range of branded and own brand pork, bacon and rasher products to Ireland’s key retailers.

Oliver Carty operated an amalgamation of four different software systems, namely financial, intake, production, and dispatch. The interaction between the four systems was minimal, causing serious delays with the availability of real-time information and reporting bottlenecks.

After a full analysis of the existing software, Oliver Carty decided to replace their entire system with two fully integrated software solutions that could manage all of the financial and factory floor production processes from door-to-door.

Simply Dynamics was chosen for its Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP solution. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is providing the finance department with immediate access to information such as order history, credit management, order status, and claims processing.

Oliver Carty has achieved some significant benefits as a result of the new solution including a 50% reduction in the time taken to run financial reports and a 40% reduction in the time to complete the cheque run process.

The Microsoft Dynamics Nav system delivered by Simply Dynamics integrates fully with Oliver Carty’s production management software, which was provided by Emydex Technology. The combination of the Simply Dynamics and Emydex systems enables communication and synchronisation of both master and transactional data from all departments within the organisation to Microsoft Dynamics Nav. This fully integrated solution can now be applied to any future Emydex and Simply Dynamics implementations.

Nicole Verdon, financial controller, Oliver Carty said, “The integration between Simply Dynamics and Emydex provides us with instant visibility and traceability across the entire organisation. The Simply Dynamics solution has also streamlined all our processes and we now have real-time access to our key performance indicators such as yield, pricing and invoicing data for the company.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is also enabling Oliver Carty to manage multiple sales order processes including Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which is essential in the food distribution industry for communication with its retail customers. It also has the ability to account for catch weights, enabling Oliver Carty to manage products priced by weight but whose weight varies.

Ted Carty, managing director, Oliver Carty commented, “We operate in a market where the price of raw materials are constantly changing so we need to have the most accurate information at any given time. Simply Dynamics has provided us with highly integrated, real-time information at our fingertips, enabling us to make fast and smart business decisions.”

Willie Fitzgerald, Sales Manager, Simply Dynamics said, “Microsoft Dynamics NAV has given Oliver Carty the ability to simplify access to business critical financial information and enhance its control and visibility over an expanding business. As the company continues to grow Microsoft Dynamics NAV has the flexibility to change and grow with them and meet the unique needs of a company operating in the food distribution industry.”

David McMahon, CEO, Emydex said “the Emydex factory floor data capture and production reporting system is designed to be ‘open’ such that it can interface to, and exchange data with any 3rd party ERP or financial system, as well as any 3rd party Cold Store or Supplier systems. The fact we have now collaborated closely with Simply Dynamics to build a bridge to Microsoft’s NAV ERP system is a win-win for all parties but especially our customers. “Build once, use many times” means the integration points between Emydex and NAV come practically out-of-the-box reducing installation and testing time and hence cost.”

Oliver Carty plans to extend its Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution to incorporate other areas of the business such as inventory and warehousing over the coming months.

Source article: Simply Dynamics – Oliver Carty news article
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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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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Oliver Carty testimonial video

Emydex case study with Oliver Carty, a Pork and Bacon producer based in Athlone, Ireland. The video describes how Oliver Carty use Emydex’s Production Management software throughout their 2 further processing factories from door to door, covering Intake, Box packing, Order Picking (Scanning) and Dispatch.

The video also shows Oliver Carty’s use of Emydex’s back-office Client software to report on their Stocks, Yields and food Chain Traceability.

Oliver Carty Video

Emydex staff 2014
2014 Emydex Team

Highlight Comments on project

We wanted a model that worked completely from backdoor through to dispatch, a system that could give us data and ease of use was of key importance to us.”
Justin Lennon, Key Account Manager, Oliver Carty

“We work on any hardware therefore we were able to
re-use their existing hardware which saved them
a lot of cost.

From our perspective, Oliver Carty is a very progressive and innovative food processing company. We recognise their willingness to invest in technologies solutions to give them accurate reporting on their metrics that drive their business. So I view the relationship as a partnership rather than a traditional customer supplier relationship.”

Dave McMahon, CEO, Emydex

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