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Home / Archives for Software

Turning over a new leaf in New Zealand

5th May 2022

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

 

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

Request a Demo

Filed Under: Industry News, Markets, Software

Enterprise Management Software

9th November 2021

A new era in Food Enterprise Management Software Applications

Emydex’s new suite of Enterprise Management Software (EMS) applications are designed specifically for multi-faceted food processing companies, those which are mainly multi-plant operations, usually overseen by a group HQ plant. Typically, these plants are spread geographically across a country or several countries and would be large food processing organisations. 

It is difficult to maintain data integrity across these often-complex businesses, is often labour intensive and prone to human error with the duplication of information across multiple systems. 

Emydex’s answer to this problem is the Emydex Enterprise Management System (EMS) suite of software which comprises a series of web apps targeted specifically at maintaining data integrity, reducing data entry, and improving control across plants. 

From a system architecture point of view, the EMS layer resides between the customer ERP system and the various operating plants.

The EMS layer of the Emydex software stack is made up of several web apps tailored towards solving these problems for multi-plant customers.

 

Business Intelligence (BI)

Emydex BI is the latest app of the Enterprise layer allowing customers to surface data to provide visual real-time and trending analytical dashboards. Sitting at the corporate level allows integration to multiple plants to surface data as well as other third-party systems such as ERP & financial systems.  Find out more here

 

Master Data Management (MDM)

Master Data Management (MDM) is designed to control data integrity to ensure it is consistent across all plants. The Master data management module allows customers to centrally manage master data such as products, label designs, kill line destinations as well as other required data.

This removes the effort needed by plant staff to replicate data into each instance of Emydex which instantly reduces the risk of human error. With EMS MDM, corporate users can centrally control all aspects of master data which creates consistency across the business. An example of this is that if a label design is managed centrally, the label will look identical, no matter the plant it was produced from, which from a customer's point of view can be critical. This can also reduce incorrect labelling which can cause product recalls and market rejections, impacting the business brand and reputation.

 

EMS App Deployment

This app empowers the Emydex customer's IT department to take control of deploying the Emydex applications out to the plants. This increases IT security and allows the IT department to pull updates into the business network to then choose when to deploy to the individual plants. This in turn allows the customer to be more self-sufficient in relation to updating plant's MES software outside of production.

 

EMS Exchange

EMS Exchange is Emydex’s newest approach to integration between the plants and third-party systems such as ERP systems and cold stores. It allows for the configuration of rules to route data from one system to other(s). This reduces the customisation required to integrate the Emydex applications into other third-party systems

 


Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS)

Emydex’s first Enterprise module was the Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) which allows customers to centrally control, capture, store and report on various quality & technical aspects of their operations.
Find out more here…

 

The future of EMS

The Emydex new product development team are busy working on new apps and features to further extend and enhance our offerings, including additional EMS modules such as Centralised Product Specifications, Production Planning, Payments, Livestock Appointments and Yield Costing. 

Watch this space!

 

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

Request a Demo

Filed Under: Africa, Australasia, Carcass Management, Company News, ERP Systems Integration, Europe, Industry News, Kill Line & Settlements, Markets, North America, Packing Management, Product News, Production Planning, Quality Management, Recipe Formulation, Software, Traceability Reporting, Warehouse Management, Yields & Costings

Emydex CEO Update

19th October 2021

A note from Emydex CEO, David McMahon

After the year of uncertainty, travel restrictions and lockdowns that was 2020, this year 2021 has seen a gradual return to normality, albeit with the markets we serve being in different stages of recovery, with Europe ahead of our colleagues in the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand in terms of numbers vaccinated.

The Emydex country teams, still mainly working from home, are busy working on a number of large customer projects. These include Emydex V5 system upgrades for some of our larger multi-plant customers in Ireland, as well as continuing to build ‘group standard solutions for some of our newer multi-site processors in Europe, Canada as well as New Zealand

Throughout 2021, Emydex has continued to solidify its position as a global provider of MES solutions by building out our people and bases in the further stretches of the world including New Zealand and in North America, where new customers and new employees have been added to both Emydex companies established at the end of 2020

On the Product Development front, our software has evolved from our traditional 3-tiered software stack comprising the core platform, software modules and business logic, to add two new layers of software.

Our new Automation layer includes a suite of software modules such as the DCI (Data Communications Interface) that enables Emydex software to connect to factory floor automated machines and robots via standard protocols (OPC) as well as a new Simulator module that enables our customers to conduct scenario planning, as well as to test Emydex software in advance of the installation of factory floor machinery and to train operators in advance of go-live

Our new EMS layer of software developed for our enterprise-level multi-site processing customers, includes software modules such as Master Data Management, Emydex BI, EMS Exchange, Centralised Reporting as well as App Deployment, a suite of software applications designed to facilitate the central creation and dissemination of data files from group HQ to remote plants, as well as consolidated analysis and reporting.

Finally, our technology mix has expanded beyond our traditional windows desktop applications running on-premise, to complement these with new web-based applications (Blazor) as well as Android applications (Xamarin) such as our new XDA for handheld scanning applications, a replacement for our legacy SDA application running on the end-of-life windows mobile operating system.

Looking to the future, Emydex plans to continue to grow our teams of people in Ireland, North America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as form new strategic partnerships with global providers of Industrial equipment, ERP integrators and MES consultancy firms with specialist knowledge of the workings of the meat, fish and food processing industries.

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

Request a Demo

Filed Under: Africa, Australasia, Cold Storage, Company News, Europe, Industry News, Markets, North America, Product News, Software

Introducing Emydex Business Intelligence (BI)

3rd September 2021

Utilise Analytics to derive Insights into your production data

Data & Information has been referred to as the oil of the 21st century. Having the right data, at the right time, is vital to the success of any food processor.

The first step in this process is ensuring data is collected accurately, in a consistent method. Once captured, this data should be easily accessible and understandable by various stakeholders in the business.

Analysing data will tell stories and show insights that would otherwise go unnoticed. Analytics enables people to see the wood from the trees, to see patterns and trends in large datasets, that can assist with identifying issues within production environments, identify trends within factories, benchmarking business units, reporting KPI’s and can teach you things about your business you didn’t know before – replacing guesswork and gut feel.

How Emydex will help you strike oil

Emydex’s latest software module, Emydex BI, provides Emydex customers with a slick new interface that allows users to easily access and visualise data from any software system including Emydex factory floor Production systems, Emydex’s Quality Management system, 3rd party ERP systems, other shop floor Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES’s) as well as various other third-party systems.

Watch the Emydex Promo Video

Cross Platform App

The Emydex BI app, which is available as both a web app running in a browser or Windows desktop app, provides rich data visualisation for end-users allowing them to drill into, slice and dice and filter various data using sixteen different interactive presentation widgets. Connecting to multiple systems, Emydex BI pulls data from multiple sources into one location, where users can find all the answers they are looking for (as well as questions they didn’t have!)

Sitting at the enterprise level of the Emydex architecture, the Emydex BI tool is easily able to connect to multiple plants systems to access the data depending on the level of security configured per user.

Share & Refresh

Share the results easily with the ability to export the entire dashboard results, or an individual widget at the press of a button.

Individual dashboards can be set up with automatic refresh rates, meaning your data is always up to date!

Design With Ease

Administrator users can easily design and update dashboards using either the web or desktop dashboard editor with tools to bring your data to life.

The Emydex BI App has version control built in, allowing you to update and publish documents with confidence.

The Emydex BI tool also supports static reports, meaning you are able to produce your static formatted reports directly from the Emydex BI tool!

Features

  • Cloud-Based or Windows Desktop
  • Easy to use widgets to visualise data
  • Easily filter/drill down/interrogate data
  • Combine multiple data sources/views into one dashboard
  • Mobile/Tablet access using the web app
  • Configurable automatic update refresh rates

Benefits

  • Reduce reporting time
  • Increase business awareness
  • Real-time access to data
  • Data on the move using mobiles/tablets with the Webapp

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

Request a Demo

Filed Under: Africa, Australasia, Cold Storage, Company News, Europe, Industry News, Markets, North America, Product News, Software

Eliminate costly carton rejections with Emydex and Meat Messaging

21st August 2021

The international trade of food products has over time become highly competitive with many large multinational companies emerging to satisfy the demand for the supply of high quality, safe and affordable products.
 

In competitive market conditions, the access to export markets is being increasingly underpinned by effective and transparent traceability, quality and food safety compliance and proof of authenticity and origin. To better fulfil these requirements, innovative integrated software systems that can easily adapt to changing regulatory environments is key to securing access to these markets and increasing efficiency across the value chain.
 

Emydex factory floor software for meat, fish, and food processing, integrated with Meat Messaging is one such solution.


Meat Messaging
was developed by the Australian meat industry including organisations such as AUS-MEAT, DAWE, AMPC, AMIC and MLA to increase the market access to the US for Australian meat exporters and to reduce the number of rejects caused by missing or incorrect port marking of cartons costing the industry an estimated AUD14.5 million per year.
 

What is Meat Messaging?

The system provides an electronic method to send a comprehensive list of GS1 labelled carton records, forming part of an export shipment including export certifications to a centralised cloud storage and indexing system and making that information available at the point of import.

Importers are presented with all the relevant traceability information through Meat Messaging to correctly identify cartons on a shipment and are now able to re-mark the cartons if any port mark non-conformances are identified. This process virtually eliminates the rejection of cartons due to port mark errors or omissions.
 

Key Requirements

Two key requirements need to be fulfilled to integrate with the Meat Messaging system. These are the creation of GS1 barcoded cartons and records, and also to have the ability to send the shipment details and carton records to the Meat Messaging platform.

By making use of the Emydex Packing and Labelling solution which allows for the creation of the GS1 labelled carton records and the Emydex Sales Order Dispatch functionality in conjunction with the Emydex Meat Messaging web service, both requirements are covered.
Emydex has worked closely with the AMPC and industry producers to fully integrate the Meat Messaging system into the Emydex Factory Floor software modules to provide an easy to use and efficient interface.

This ensures that our customers can capitalize on the latest technological developments in the market and ensure that their products have the best chance of reaching their destination, gaining full value from each export to the US.
 

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

Request a Demo

Filed Under: Company News, Industry News, Markets, Software

Tracking Operational Performance in Further Processing Plants

24th July 2021

Tracking Operational Performance in Food Processing is significantly different than in traditional Manufacturing Processing.

I worked for many years as a Director of Technology for a large multi-site meat processor in Canada. I later switched tracks to become an independent software consultant helping several mid to large meat processors. For the last 15 years, I have worked with software vendors like Emydex, to implement shop floor solutions for meat, fish, and food processors. I have been trained in the standard APICS (American Production and Inventory Control Society). The APICS standard approaches for manufacturing control needs to be modified to support the requirements in the meat and food processing industries.

Users and companies in the food industry are very hands-on people looking to provide the best quality food for their customers, with many of them skeptical about the use of software to improve their processes. Their work experiences have found that standard ERP shop floor software does not work for their operations and these companies are having to rely on many manual workarounds with limited improvements. The key phrase used in a continuous improvement project is “What gets measured, gets managed” and what’s managed, improves! The problem is getting reliable production information from the shop floor in a timely manner.

The key to providing accurate operational measurement and traceability is tracking the movement of materials from initial receiving through the production process to a final finished product and shipment to the end customer. The diagram below shows the required flow for production control.

flow-of-production-control

Receiving / Intake Purchase Orders (PO)

Like other manufacturing, all goods for manufacturing need to be received against a purchase order (PO), the difference is that during the intake/receiving process there are several additional information points that need to be captured.

In addition, the received materials require a readable barcode from the supplier or have one created the intake/receiving process:

    • Food Processors require traceability of all the raw materials, ingredients and any packaging materials that make contact with the finished product
    • For raw meat and vegetable materials, we need to capture what vendor/packer harvested the animals and on what date were they harvested.
    • For ingredients and packaging, we need to capture Lot information and best before dates
    • We need to capture both quantity (number of containers) and weight or volume of the received materials. The software needs to be capable of tracking two units of measure, quantity and weight or volume in inventory. We need to keep track of Lot and other information in the inventory control module.
    • It is hoped that the vendor providing the purchased goods would provide readable barcodes of the received product, but frequently the receiving plant will need the capability of creating internal barcodes to apply to the receiving pallet or in some situations, each individual container
    • In the food industry there are many HACCP and Quality checks that are required during receiving to ensure the purchased material is safe for use in production

The receiving process provides the initial traceability link to the received materials

Once the material is received it is moved to an authorized inventory storage location. In the food industry companies need to control where allergen materials are stored. This receiving/intake process is critical to assign an internal lot number to allow tracking through the process and back for recall and measurement reporting.

Production Work Orders (WO)

The next key process is to track to issuing materials to a production Work Order in order to transform those materials into WIP (work in process) or finished goods. Many food processing companies struggle with the concept of work orders. A work order is a document given to the manufacturing shop floor by the production planner as an authorization to manufacture a certain quantity of one or many items. The work order provides all the information about a production task. The work order can include details on how to complete the job, the location or area that the job is being completed, what ingredients and materials are required and the expected output from the completion of the work order. The work order is also the link (traceability) of the flow of product through the food plant. 

All food plants have some method of informing production what they should be making, many plants do not call these instructions a work order but that is what is used in best of class food processors. The work order is the method of allocating ingredients/materials and labour transactions to a production step or task.  The value of using a work order is that they tend to boost productivity in very efficient ways because of the clear instructions and it provides the data capture points for continuous improvement monitoring. 

Most food processors start with creation of the work orders manually based on a production plan, and then over time look to leverage the capability of their ERP system MRP module to generate the production demands in the form of work orders.

The work order is the tool to convert or consume materials and convert them into producing a different enhanced output product either a finished good or a work in process item. The work order is able to generate operational measurement reports in the form of yields (measurement of input product compared to the output, and measurement of standards (BOM) quantities to actual quantities used or produced) and labour analysis. Since the plant solution is yielding data from purchasing through to the end production, the software solution can capture and flow actual costs from a PO to an end product. 

The purchased material can flow through multi work orders of blending, forming, cooking and finally a packaging work order to produce the finished goods. The work orders provide the links through the production process to track the movement of product and capture the manufacturing performance of yield and labour.

Inventory Control

Inventory control is the module that monitors the plus and minus as the materials movement through the production process to finished goods and eventually to an end customer. The inventory control module in food processing requires the following unique functionality:

  • Ability to manage and control two units of measure
    • Quantity, boxes, pallets, containers, totes
    • Weight or Volume
      • Note the solution needs to be able to track variable weights (catch weights) as materials in a container can each have a different weight (example each box with 3 hams in a box weigh a different amount)
  • Ability to capture lot information
  • Serialized box and pallet control improve the accuracy of inventory
  • Ability to control dates for the product
    • Best before
    • Use by date
    • Harvest Date
    • Etc

The inventory control module is used to ensure you have the correct amount of inventory to support production, Min/Max levels, and age of the products. The inventory module is also the control tool to ensure all the production process are flowing correctly. Inventory control can provide the following improvements in operations:

  • Reduce distress sales and plants have visibility as products are reaching their sell by dates
  • Reduce production material expediting as the availability and age of the materials/ingredients are verified prior to production
  • Efficiency of finding the products is improved as the inventory control system is aware of where stock can be located at all times  
  • Inventory turns can be tracked to ensure efficient use of warehouse resources
  • Ensure optimal stock rotation that ensures the oldest materials are used first
  • Any missing production transactions will show in inventory

Sales Order (SO) Picking

Sales Order Picking is the final transaction of issuing products to customers and have the following unique requirements in food processing.

  • Controlling of order picking to ensure the oldest or the oldest product that a customer will accept is picked. Note that some customers have specific age restrictions that they only will accept fresh product that is no greater than 3 days old or product must have a best before date of 30 days. The picking software needs to be able to support those customer specific requirements.
  • During picking we need to capture the actual container variable weights (catch weights) as product is sold by the container but priced by the weight in the container
  • The efficiency of the order pickers can be monitored
  • All the lot traceability information needs to be captured during the picking stage

Conclusion

Implementing a formalized production process that is controlled with work orders saves a lot of time, it can increase efficiency, reduce overtime, improve visibility of production, and provide traceability for any recalls that could be required. 

Food Processing continues to get more complex due supply chain pressures, labour shortage, the need for production efficiency in competitive markets and the looming price pressures. 

Emydex Technology has a proven food industry solution that can integrate with your current systems.

Please contact me Terry McCorriston to start your journey to improve operational performance on the shop floor. 

 

 

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

Request a Demo

Filed Under: Africa, Industry News, Other Processing, Quality Management

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