Contact |

Food Processing Software Solutions

Yields & Costings

Home / Archives for Software / Yields & Costings

Emydex Door-to-Door in Junee Lamb, NSW, Australia

Emydex complete the system implementation with new customer in Australia, Junee Lamb, NSW

 

Meliomar traceability tagging

Junee Lamb is one of New South Wales’ leading sheep meat processors and exporters. With a focus on high quality chilled lamb for the domestic market as well as having significant export sales, Junee process over 3500 head of lambs daily. Junee also provides a service kill and boning operation for other customers such as major supermarket chains who wish to market their own product. All product is certified Halal and some product is processed as organic lamb.

Factory Floor Production Control System

Junee Lamb had a requirement to upgrade their existing factory floor production control system at the plant in Junee, as well as their Sydney wholesale and further processing systems, to a modern, flexible, user-friendly system which fully integrates all processes required for the procurement, slaughter, processing and sale of meat products.

Previously the company were operating with two separate factory floor data collection systems that were disconnected, and the company realised it would be more beneficial to their business to upgrade these systems to a single production management solution, offering one version of the truth, that could be tailored and customised to suit their specific business requirements.

Junee Lamb needed a system that would integrate with their existing back-office financial system, and also needed to incorporate an off-the-shelf label design system that allowed for the integration of foreign text in multiple languages, such as Arabic and Chinese.

Over the past 12 months, Emydex software engineers based in Australia, installed their Manufacturing Execution System (MES) across the entire business operations, including the lamb factory and wholesale centre. Emydex software modules implemented includes the Emydex Kill line & Payments module for stock procurement and payment, Carcass Management Module, Processing & Packing Module used for boning room production management, and the weigh-labelling of product, as well as the Emydex Warehouse Management module, used to manage and report on all factory stocks.

Many benefits have accrued from the implementation of Emydex, including the ability to cost stock purchased prior to processing, to determine a forward selling price. Another benefit is providing detailed costings reporting once skin returns, credits as well as all purchasing costs are known. Feedback to service kill operators and suppliers can be produced as soon as a lot is complete and emailed to customers.

For the domestic trade, the ability to quickly enter orders, and to produce consolidated production requirements and picking sheets, allows the orders to be accumulated during the day. Hanging product is weighed across an Emydex terminal, so invoices can be produced by delivery run from the terminal, as soon as loading is complete. This ensures accurate documentation is produced with invoices travelling with the deliveries. Similar functionality in the Sydney operation has allowed for significant growth with continued customer satisfaction.

Junee are a market-driven company who enjoy a reputation for top quality product and are seen as a market leader, especially into to the Asian market where the Junee Gold brand is recognised as one of the premier Australian brands. Consequently, virtually all stock is produced to order and is often labelled with customer order information (such as port marks) and often have complex, multi-language multi-label requirements.

Centralised Specification System

A key benefit of the system is having one centralised ‘specification’ system, where labels designs are stored with foreign text generated from the product specifications ‘real time’ using the actual text and thus not requiring images or conversion codes. All customer production requirements can be entered into a plan, which in turn generates the daily works orders, touch screen product buttons, all of which are linked to sales orders and labelling requirements. Order requirements eliminate costly over-production, and allow order fulfilment and shipping to be easily managed.

End to End Solution

By providing a fully integrated, ‘end to end’ solution Emydex have provided a platform where efficiencies have been gained in all areas of the business and allow for information to be readily available. Ease of use has ensured user acceptance has been high with minimal impact on the day to day running of the business as the system was rolled out. With 24-hour support in place, Junee can be assured that support is available 24x7 to provide comfort as the company goes ahead with plans to greatly expand the business over the next 12 months.

‘Having run the business across a number of disjointed systems previously, with little by way of fast-responding support, the business has greatly benefitted from have one, fully integrated, easy to use system. Testament to this is our recent and continuing smooth expansion, maintaining our reputation for top quality products and service. The Emydex system has provided significant benefits from its flexibility, ease of use and ability grow as we do. With Emydex now managing our ‘pasture to plate’ processes we feel confident we can meet the challenges as we expand into the future’.
Heath Newton, Managing Director - Junee Lamb

For enquiries contact sales@emydex.com or call Emydex on contact us

Request a Demo

HJ Nolan Salmon Filleting Yield Control System

HJ Nolan Ltd have been in business for 95 years, since 1912. The company sells premium seafood products worldwide, mainly smoked salmon, under the well-known ‘Nolans Seafoods’ brand. Today the company employs almost 300 people across its two Seafood processing facilities in Dublin, Ireland and Aberdeen in Scotland.

HJ Nolan approached Emydex Technology and SF Engineering in 2014, with a request to commission a new salmon filleting and trimming line from SF Engineering, integrated to an in-line real-time Yield and Efficiency reporting software system from Emydex Technology.

Sean Carolan, IT Manager with HJ Nolan’s in Dublin explains the background to the project, “before the Emydex and SF Engineering solution was implemented, all our salmon filleting was done manually. This resulted in us being unable to calculate our yields until the end of the working day, and this calculation was done with pen and paper. This process was time consuming and often lead to inaccuracies and mistakes. As our production started to ramp-up, we found it increasingly difficult to manage this process, and it became necessary to find a way to automate this process.”

Automated Yield Reporting

SF Engineering and Emydex set to work with Nolans to design and build the end-solution required. This exercise resulted in a SF Engineering salmon filleting & trimming conveyor line, complete with an In-feed holding bin, de-heading station, weigh hopper and a distribution conveyor that feeds the salmon to six salmon filleting operators working on the line. Each individual operator station consists of a buffer hopper, a holding hopper, a trimming table, an offal chute and a reset button.

SF Engineering Salmon Filleting and Trimming SystemSF Engineering Salmon Filleting and Trimming System

To operate the system, each salmon-filleter working on the conveyor line first presses their reset button. This triggers the holding hopper to retract, and a new salmon falls into the hopper from the buffer hopper. The filleter then removes the fish to complete their trimming tasks, and once completed, places the fillet back onto the magenta weighing conveyor. The conveyor records the weight of the fish, and then waits for a free space on the takeaway conveyor. Once free, the conveyor sends the fish off to the pin-bone machine. When the operator’s holding-bin is emptied, the operator presses the reset button, starting the whole process all over again.

Cloud-Hosted or On-Premise

During each operation cycle, Emydex’s Data Capture System (DCS), captures each individual filler’s production data, and calculates the batch yield in real-time. Sean Carolan explains “the Emydex software system allows us to capture accurate yield data; weight-on versus weight-off, as well as production throughput; time-on versus time-off, from each individual filleter in real-time. This information is stored in a central cloud-hosted Emydex database, that can be viewed by both operators on the line, as well as our production supervisors on an industrial monitor running Emydex in the factory.

Real-Time KPI Reporting

Displaying production data and KPIs as they are happening in real-time, tends to have a motivational effect on the filleters working on the line, and improves operator productivity. Emydex production reporting can also be accessed on client PCs in the back-office, as well as anywhere around the world via a smart-phone, given the system is hosted in the cloud”.

On-floor Production reporting monitor displays individual filleter yields and throughputs accurately in real-timeOn-floor Production reporting monitor displays individual filleter yields and throughputs accurately in real-time

Carolan Continues “The ability to export accurate information instantly from the Emydex system, has greatly improved the process by which the filleters are paid. Before the implementation of the Emydex system, the production supervisor would have had to manually calculate each filleters weights and rate of pay. This information can now be exported and sent directly to our accounts department. The individual yield of each filleter can now be much more closely monitored by their supervisor. This allows us to insure each filleter is maintaining a satisfactory yield throughout the day.”

Traceability Reporting

“In addition to Yield and efficiency reporting, Emydex is also recording and reporting on food chain traceability throughout the production process” outlines David McMahon, Emydex CEO. “traceability details recorded for each batch include the Emydex ITN (Internal Traceability number), Production run, Supplier, Harvest Number, Harvest Date, Product, Species and size. Same as for production reporting, traceability reporting is available instantly and accurately, from any device connected to the central database in the cloud. Optionally, the system can be hosting on-site/on-premises if required”.

Customer Support

Sean Carolan concludes “Emydex offered unwavering support to Nolans from the onset of this project. Throughout the initial design process, the implementation and the aftersales support, Emydex has maintained an unparalleled level of support and professionalism. It’s always a pleasure dealing with anyone from the Emydex team, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to anyone in the market for reliable, well-supported factory floor software solution.”

 

About Emydex Technology: Emydex Technology is a leading supplier of Traceability reporting and Production Management Software systems to Meat, Fish and Food Processors around the world. Over 100 food processing factories, operating across 4 continents, use Emydex factory floor software systems to monitor, control and report on their Production yields, stocks, traceability, food quality, safety and compliance.

About SF Engineering: SF Engineering is an award-winning Irish engineering company that designs and manufacturers food processing and packaging solutions for the food industry globally. The company’s Engineering solutions are operating in meat, fish and food processing companies throughout Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Chile

About Emydex & SF Engineering: Emydex Technology and SF Engineering have worked on a number of joint software/hardware integration projects for shared customers over the past number of years. In addition to the salmon filleting line solution delivered to HJ Nolans, other joint projects including Emydex integration to an SF Engineering pork primal grading line, as well as integration to RFID controlled SF Engineering conveyor systems operating in a lamb Processing plant in the UK.

For enquiries contact sales@emydex.com or call Emydex on contact us

Request a Demo

Traceability enabled 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”

Request a Demo

Rosie & Jim Value Added Poultry Processor live on Emydex

Dublin – Ireland:
Rosie and Jim was established in 1997 when award winning craft butcher, Jimmy McLoughlin established Quality First Ltd and began producing gourmet chicken products for supply to butcher shops and restaurants. Today the company produces a wide range of premium quality, ready-to-cook gluten free breaded and battered chicken products.  They also produce a variety of delicious filled wraps.  All products are available chilled or frozen.

Order Control

Rosie and Jim approached Emydex in 2016 with a view to implementing a factory-wide Production Control and Traceability Reporting IT system door-to-door. The company had no existing factory floor IT system in place, operating manual processes instead, which meant excessive recording of internal processes manually on paper, which was both laborious and time-consuming, and offered little by way of real-time production control and traceability reporting.

The company had no real insight into the quantity or value of their existing stocks, resulting in procurement planning issues. Unsure of what current stocks were available to fulfil production orders, often resulted in over-ordering of stock, and the holding of excess stock of raw materials, dry goods and ingredients on-site than was needed.

Recipe Formulation

Another issue Rosie and Jim faced from their manual process was knowing how much each production batch cost to produce. Without knowing the precise amount of raw materials and ingredients going into each production batch, and without knowing the exact value of that stock, it was impossible to accurately calculate profit/loss and production yields.

Emydex’s Recipe Formulation Software system means that now, every item is scanned and weighed into a production job in the correct quantities. The system allows Rosie & Jim to track and record every item right down to the smallest measurement that was used in a production job. By doing this, Emydex determines the value of items used in production batches, allowing the system to calculate the cost of each production batch.

Real-Time Traceability Reporting

At Intake, Emydex allocates an internal traceability number (ITN) to each batch of supplier goods received, and the goods are labelled with barcodes and stored. From this point forward, the goods are tracked and traced by factory operators using hand-held scanning terminals, throughout the different stages of production, up to the point of sales order picking and dispatch, This allows for real-time traceability reporting throughout the plant, both for forward trace reporting from suppliers to end-customers, as well as backwards.

Sage Integration

Prior to go-live, Emydex was tightly integrated with Rosie & Jim’s existing Sage 200 accounting system, with Purchase Orders and Sales Orders pulled down from stage, and well as production data sent back to Sage for invoicing of customers and supplier payments.

Go-live

“We started using Emydex on the floor in two separate stages. First, we launched Emydex on our breading line while still using test data. This included the recipe blending and packing. By the end of the first week most of the production team using the system were already comfortable with using it. You could visibly see them speeding up when going through the individual screens.  

We also started to receive goods in from Intake onto the system. This has been simplest of part of the implementation. We soon after went live proper on the 1st of April. We first implemented Emydex on our mixes & tortilla line and began to pick our sales orders via the hand-held scanners. Overall, I feel the project was a successful implementation, and the new system has been well received by our production team, operators and supervisors, better than I could have expected”.

Peter Turner, Financial Controller with Rosie & Jim

Production Reporting

Rosie and Jim now have a comprehensive reporting structure on all aspects of their production processes. The Emydex back-office reporting module provides the company with a number of different views over their cost/value figures including Real-time stock inventory and valuation, Production costing, Production costing variances, Product usage reports, production yield reports and product giveaway reports.

Emydex also worked with Rosie and Jim to develop additional reports such as Production & packing time efficiency reports and daily stock movement reports.

“From a reporting side, by the end of the first week, our production manager and I started to see proper results with regards to yields, packing volumes and stock control. I would like to thank the Emydex team as they really helped, not only with the actual development but also with suggesting practical solutions to suit our processes e.g. line-side management.”

further comments by Peter Turner, Financial Controller with Rosie & Jim

Request a Demo

Clogherhead Fishermen’s Co-Op: Labelling at Sea

Fish Processing – Clogherhead Fishermen’s Co-Op

Clogherhead Fisherman’s Co-Op, is a leading Irish Seafood producer based in Clogherhead, Co. Louth, on the East Coast of Ireland. This video describes how Clogherhead Co-Op use Emydex’s Production Management and Traceability software on their fleet of trawlers as well as throughout their processing factory for data capture, labelling of product at sea, landings, into-warehousing, sales order picking and dispatch, providing Clogherhead Co-Op with real-time and accurate Traceability reporting from boat-to-truck.

Emydex’s Labelling at Sea software operating on the fleet of twelve frozen at sea trawlers, enables on-vessel printing, meaning product arrives to shore already labelled, saving time and ensuring full Traceability from the boat to the customer.

<!–Clogherhead Co-Op Video–>

Fish Processing and Traceability

Processing and Traceablility

Project Highlights

“The key for me is that Emydex were able to provide Clogherhead with their standard fish system built in consultation with BIM (Irish Fisheries Board), the SFPA (Seafood Fisheries Protection Agency), as well as the GS1 (Global Standards agency), but allow Clogherhead to tailor and tweak the system to suit our specific needs and processes exactly.
Aside from our old factory floor system, we also previously operated a bespoke-built boat invoicing and payments system.

Emydex were able to configure and build into their standard Fish system, the very same functionality as our previous system, meaning we now have everything we need in a single system, supported in-life by the Emydex support team. After a year at sea, the Co-op that includes the factory and fleet of boats all see the efficiencies and savings realised from our new labelling-at-sea systems”

Paul Boyd, Managing Director – Clogherhead Co-Op

“This project included a first for Emydex, in that our software is now operating on a fleet of boats in an offline environment, but at the same time has proved very successful. Hopefully over time this is something that will be adopted by the fishing industry as a whole”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO

Request a Demo

Yield & Costing Analysis in the Food industry

NORTH AMERICA:

The food industry is no different than any other complex manufacturing business whose goal is to make a profit. If you are not able to calculate your true manufacturing cost, it could lead to lost profits, orders and customers. To remain profitable, you need to answer a number of questions; Are you pricing your products to make a profit? Are you producing the products at the cost you calculated? Are you contributing to overhead and profit levels to meet your strategic business goals?

In the food industry, there are very small margins, making it difficult for food companies to achieve and maintain profitability. One of the first lessons of accounting is the equation of Profit = Revenues – Costs

In the food industry, the volumes are fairly flat, growth is slow, so food processing companies need to be focused on managing costs as the best option to improve profitability. Determining what are the product and customer costs is not as simple as it seems in the food industry. Over the last 15 years many food companies have either gone out of business or been bought out by a larger company due to lack of profit.

Current state of ERP vendors able to support the food industry costing

Food companies are not able to calculate accurate costs with their current software systems due to limitations in these systems required to support food industry requirements. The quality and specification of raw materials vary significantly from vendor to vendor and at different times of the year. This is especially true in the meat industry where each species carcass is a different size and weight, so for example, each ham or loin produced has different amounts of lean/fat, bone and trim.

The process of blending, mixing and cooking can produce different yield losses depending on the attributes of the raw materials used, and the setup of the equipment. ERP vendor software is not designed to track and measure yield loss tracking as the product moves through the various food production processes.

Due to the limitations in the costing functionality, many companies use manual (spreadsheet) calculations to determine product costs. While spreadsheets may work for smaller, ad-hoc analysis, they fall short in handling massive complex costing processes due to their limitations with scalability, data integrity, integration and security. They are also open to clerical error (no validation), and are typically reliant on a few key individuals within the organisation. The ‘hit by a bus’ risk is a cause for concern.

Furthermore, manual cost calculations are then fed into some type of profitability analysis, but the challenge is that the manual data capture is flawed, making these analyses less than optimal. For food companies to survive in the current economy they require accurate and complete profitability information.

Addressing the challenge of calculating costs

From the big picture perspective, it is relatively easy to calculate profit. Total up all your revenue and expense accounts and calculate the difference between the two. This tells you that in total income made or lost, but at a macro level. The calculation of profit for specific products or customers can easily explode into a massive undertaking. Companies do not know where to look to address their profitability issues.

The current situation of limitations of profitable reporting is a direct correlation with the challenges the food manufacturers face when calculating accurate cost results – lack of an automated costing process, substantial manual processes, lack of operational measurement to ensure accuracy of results and lack of granularity.

Food companies have tried different approaches to address the costing requirement. They have tried sophisticated spreadsheets, in some cases using a network of complex spreadsheets. Others have attempted to modify their ERP or Financial (GL) systems to handle the advance costing needs of the food industry, but often these modifications fail to deliver a comprehensive cost system. Lastly, companies have embarked on building their own custom cost system from the ground up. While these systems will give the company exactly the costing system they want, it comes at a significant cost of time, money and resources.

Operational costing systems are the next generation of solutions created specifically to handle the complex costing and measurement environments encountered by food process manufactures. These package solutions that integrate with your existing ERP or Financial System allow companies to rapidly gain access to detailed cost data that that is specific to their food production process. Access to detailed product information brings a whole new level of insight on operation performance and arms the Operational Management team with information to effectively manage and implement continuous improvement projects to reduce costs.

By adding an operational costing and measurement system to the existing business systems, food manufactures can remedy many of the symptoms that produce an ailing cost process.

How Operational Costing in the Food Industry Improves Profitability

Your competitor just undercut your price, so to be competitive in the market you’re probably thinking that all you have to do is meet or beat your competitor’s price to get the deal. Let’s just reduce or eliminate the overhead contribution, and quote the price based on the materials and labour, then mark up the cost to meet the company profit margins. Right? Wrong. There are many manufacturing companies who price on the basis of what their competitors charge or the market price, without considering whether their competitors have a different cost structure or knowing their own true manufacturing costs. If you base your prices on what others are doing, you’ll never know if you’re taking in profitable business.

Instead, adopt a different approach that will bring in profitable business while remaining competitive, by implementing Emydex’s Yield and Costing Module that is a fully integrated component of the Emydex Production Management Platform, that is tightly integrated to your existing ERP or Financial System.

Emydex Yields Core

Yields & Costings Module, on Emydex Core Platform, integrated to back-office ERP

With the recipe BOM (Bill of Materials), Emydex is able to model the flow of raw materials, ingredients, packaging, resources and overhead through the food production process. By monitoring actual costs and product movement through the process, Emydex is able to generate yield variances, and measure the financial impact of production using standard reports to validate the accuracy of the costing standards.

These costs and variances can be integrated with your existing financial system to provide a more global analysis of profitability.

By knowing the true costs of producing products at your food plant, Emydex’s Yield & Costings software gives you the knowledge needed to make strategic and operational decisions that will keep your business profitable.

Terry McCorriston, Authorised Distributor, Emydex North America

Emydex Canada / North America

Terry McCorriston Consulting
28 McGibbon Crt
Kitchener, Ontario
Canada
N2A 3P2
T: + 001 519 500 0540

Terry McCorriston

LinkedIn – profile

Contact Sales

Email – sales@emydex.com

Request a Demo