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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 rollout across Dawn Meats Group

Dawn Meats Brand
An Emydex customer since 2007, the Dawn Meats Group is one of the largest suppliers of Irish and British Beef, Pork and Lamb in Europe.

Last year (2012) was a milestone year for the group as it secured a 5 year €300m contract for McDonalds, in addition to building a new state of the art patty plant at Carroll’s Cross, Co Waterford, as well as acquiring West Devon Meats in South West England. This follows the group’s acquisition of the Duerden beef abattoir in the Lake District, and the upgrade of their beef slaughter and processing plant in Cardington, UK in 2011.

Dawn Meats began rolling out Emydex’s Production Management software system across the group during 2008. Four years later, Emydex continues to operate as the group standard factory floor data capture and production and traceability reporting system in 11 of the 13 plants within the group including Dawn Meats France.

From Carcass intake, through boning, further processing, packing, box stock and dispatch, Emydex captures and reports on production data, enabling Dawn Meats to analyse and manage their stocks, yields and dispatches, whilst maintaining full food chain traceability.

Commenting on the Emydex system roll-out Shane Slattery, Group IT Manager with Dawn Meats said “Emydex is a central pillar of our strategic IT plan going forward, and our goal now is to concentrate on completing the roll-out of Emydex to our primary processing sites by year end. This plan may seem aggressive, but we believe that it is achievable on account of the inherent flexibility of the core Emydex product to handle any differences in the business processes required in our disparate sites”.

Plans are to complete the Emydex roll-out across the group in 2013, with the implementation of the system at Dawn’s Lamb processing plant in Ballyhaunis in Ireland, as well as the roll-out of Emydex’s kill line & payments systems to all of Dawn’s slaughter plants within the group.

For more information on the Emydex kill line system contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Future Trends

What are meat processors and retailers currently looking for from IT systems? What is driving that demand (e.g. legislation, environmental and/or other)? What are the general trends? Future trends?

In our experience meat processors are generally looking for five things when deciding to implement new software systems.

  • Full integration between Financial and production systems
  • Dynamic Yield reports that highlight areas where improvements can be made
  • Dynamic reporting of the status of production against plan
  • Accurate reporting of stock, with age analysis and availability
  • Fast, accurate order picking and containerising, ensuring documentation does not hold up deliveries.

The drivers are usually one or a combination of requirements to drive efficiencies, legislative demands, customer demand and ultimately profitability.

Future trends are definitely towards more automation in processing. Emydex are actively involved in shop floor automation projects specifically designed to improve yield, throughput and efficiency.

Minimizing operator involvement is also high on a list of customer priorities, Emydex systems are being used to plan production in the office and then issue those plans to the shop floor to control production using RFID tracking and shop floor automation, with the minimum of operator involvement.

A key benefit that results from implementation of all of the above functionality is traceability that is second to none. Emydex systems record the full history of everything that has happened to a product, whether it is a forward trace, backward trace or mass-balance traceability report. Furthermore, for re-usable containers such as refrigerated containers, crates, dolav’s (pallet boxes), hooks and gambrels, Emydex can even trace the history of every product that has ever been in that container.

Emydex on Demand

The Emydex team have been quietly developing a solution which we expect to have a major impact on small to medium size processors who do not have their own in house IT departments.

Emydex on Demand utilises the power and availability of the internet for the deployment of new standard solutions being developed. Emydex on Demand is a hybrid solution, not running fully as “Software as a Service” (i.e. Hosted in the cloud);

Emydex recognise that processors still need to be able to label boxes even if the network connection is down. As such the new standard Emydex application programs for data collection will run on the data collection terminal itself, not on the internet, the terminals will also have their own off line database allowing operation to continue even if internet connection is not available.

The Emydex database however will be hosted on the Microsoft Azure “cloud platform” this platform is constantly being updated by Microsoft in terms of both hardware and software. Back up is also inbuilt into the Azure package. From a support point of view, Emydex technicians are dealing with one standard database. Software deployment of both shop floor and office applications is achieved simply by selecting a hyperlink which automatically downloads and installs the application programs.

Emydex Apps!

Not quite the same as those thousands of little programs that can be down loaded to your smart phone or tablet but following the same idea. Emydex will be launching a sequence of standard shop floor applications for collecting data, printing labels and reports for commonly used applications in the food industry.

Each application will have a shop floor component and a corresponding back office component. Both components will connect to the Emydex on Demand database running in the cloud. Developed using the combined 130 years of food industry experience inherent in the Emydex design team, the standard apps will have a degree of built in configurability enabling them to meet the majority of users requirements.

Initial apps being developed are:

  • Outer Case Marking Station
  • Individual Pack Labelling Station
  • Recipe Formulation Station
  • Intake Station
  • Dispatch Station
  • Into/Out of Process Station

If a user invests in more than one application they will share the same database, enabling Emydex standard client applications for reporting on Process, Yields and Stocks.

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Green Farm Foods live with Emydex

Since its foundation in 1991, Green Farm Foods have continuously expanded over the past two decades to meet growing demand for their food products. Today the company employs just over 100 people at a 4,000 sq. metre facility in Rathowen, Co. Westmeath in Ireland. Green Farm Foods specialise in the production of premium-cooked consumer foods for companies like Supervalu, Centra, Dunnes Stores, Tesco, Londis, Spar and Superquinn in Ireland.

Green Farm Foods growth plans included a requirement to utilise the latest technologies to allow for increased production capacity, higher standards and more innovative products. To help deliver this goal, Green Farm Foods contacted Emydex in April 2012 with a view to installing an Emydex Production Management system to capture, manage and report on production data across the plant from door to door.

Two project phases included replacing their AMPS warehousing intake and dispatch system in Phase 1 and later replacing their existing Scanvaegt Packing stations in Phase 2. The Emydex system is also integrated to their Pegasus Opera Financial System to synchronise master data files such as product, suppliers, customers, customer pricing and labelling, as well as to receive notification of all POs for pending goods to be received. Sales orders are currently keyed directly into the Emydex system.

“Similar to our other customers, Green Farm Foods had a few specific requirements we hadn’t previously built, that did not exist in our standard Packing and Processing module” said David McMahon, Emydex CEO. The Emydex Packing module incorporated two standard packing modules that include (1) box weighing and labelling followed by containerising/labelling at pallet level and (2) pack weighing and labelling followed by containerising at box level. Green Farm Foods had requirement for a 3rd variation of packing whereby it would be possible to pack multiple-products into a box, followed by box labelling. “Given the inherent flexibility of the Emydex system, we were able to code the changes for Green Farm Foods into their customer specific layer of business logic. Should other customers also look for similar functionality in the future, this feature may well end up as a standard feature of our Emydex Packing & Processing Module but this decision will very much depend on customer demand” added McMahon.

Another difference was that Emydex Dry Goods Intake functionality traditionally works over handheld scanners, whereas Bulk Intake took place over a fixed point terminal and scales. Green Farm Foods had a requirement to Intake both Dry and Bulk Goods on fixed point terminals, so again this was customised to suit their requirements exactly. “At this stage after 8 years of continuous product development, refinement and enhancement we pretty much have everything that any food processing customer could wish to look for, but if we don’t we can develop it quickly and easily given the flexible nature of the technology platform the Emydex system is built on”.

Commenting on the final phase of the project going live in August 2012, Robert Patton, Financial Controller with Green Farm Foods said “with Emydex we were able to replace our previous systems with minimal fuss and down-time, and with little requirement for operator retraining. Given Emydex is an open system we were able to reuse much of our existing hardware and were able to minimise the need to purchase any new hardware.”

“Green Farm Foods now have a fully functioning production management software system that covers all aspects of our production process within a single system. With Emydex we can create any number of warehouses and locations ourselves to track and control stock. We can Intake bulk, dry goods and packaging stock, we can build, break-down and rebuild pallets as required, we can scan stock from each and every stock location to any other location, we can issue To Production, issue From Production, Write-off and Dispatch stock. On the reporting side we now have the ability to run live Yield reports across various stages of our production process, in addition to the entire plant. Emydex were also able to implement their out-of-the-box stock reconciliation system without any fuss or difficulty”.

For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Emydex Beef Kill Line goes live in Euro Farm Foods.

Euro Farm Foods
Euro Farm Foods operate a beef slaughter plant at Cooksgrove, near Duleek in Co. Meath. The present business is unrecognisable from the small local abattoir taken over in 2001 by Michael & Agnes Fox. Continuous investment in infrastructure and personnel has helped the business establish and succeed in a demanding customer driven market.

With a view to further development of the business, in late 2010 Euro Farm Foods decided to upgrade from their previous factory software system to Emydex’s Kill line and Carcass Management system. After a period of design, installation and implementation, the go-live was complete in June 2011.

The Emydex lairage system in Euro Farm Foods links to both the AIMs and Bord Bia’s Quality Assurance systems in real-time, retrieving and verifying animal details, as well as farm quality assured status. Their upgraded kill line system includes an ear-tag sequencer, Grading/Weighing Stations, as well as Carcass Dispatch and Offal Packing terminals. Euro Farm Foods now also operate Emydex’s multi-currency Cattle payments system for animal settlements and cheque/remittance printing. The payments module also provides Euro Farm with the functionality to interface with their financial software package.

Commenting on the Emydex project, Ciaran Boyle, Financial Controller with Euro Farm Foods said; “Any decision to switch management information software is difficult due to a multitude of factors involved. After researching the factory software options which would best fit our business, we were impressed by the product and the people that are Emydex. It was reassuring to discuss our needs with people who knew and understood our business. This worked particularly well during the development of the cattle payments module. Difficulties encountered during the implementation process were not allowed become problems with agreed solutions delivered. Users have the benefits of improved accurate and reliable business reporting, stock controls, traceability and quality information. The support tools and staff also deserve a mention. Their assistance has been of particular help to our business.”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO added ‘as Euro Farm Foods are a single plant customers it was crucial Emydex provided Euro Farms with a cut-over to Emydex with as little disruption to production as possible. We initially implemented our Carcass dispatch module on an offal packing and carcass dispatch terminals, while interfacing back to their existing kill line system to extract and report on kill line activity. Once we were happy offal packing and carcass dispatch were all working fine, and the reports were correct we swapped out their existing kill line and payments systems with Emydex and switched over to Emydex entirely.
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Emydex Lamb Kill Line system’s now live in Kepak plants

Emydex’s Lamb Kill Line system was implemented in Kepak’s Hacketstown Lamb slaughter plant in February 2011. Following on from a go-live of the same Lamb kill line system In Kepak Athleague in December 2010, this latest system go-live marks the completion of Emydex’s upgrade to all of Kepak’s kill lines in Ireland with six kill lines now running on Emydex, four of which are beef. This leaves only the Beef and Lamb kill lines in Kepak’s Wakefield plant in the UK due for completion in August 2011.

Similar to the Emydex Beef system, the Lamb kill line system allows for online real-time validation of a farmer’s status within Bord Bia’s Lamb Quality Assurance Scheme. This operates at Lamb lot level giving instant feedback as to whether Lamb farmers qualify for the Bord Bia quality assurance scheme or not.

The capacity also exists with the Emydex system for online integration to the Department of Agriculture’s AIMS system for notifying DAFF of animal movements to slaughter factory and kill. Kepak are using the AIMS system for reporting Beef movements in all of its beef kill plants.

Features of the Emydex Lamb kill line system include:

  • High Speed Lamb Processing
  • Automatic destination code assignment
  • Operator friendly running totals
  • Tally roll printing
  • Automatic switching to next lot when current log complete on Ear tag station (Sequencer)
  • Post grading lambs are assigned individual IDS by the system allowing for full traceability on entering boning hall and dispatch

Commenting on the recent Lamb Kill line systems going live, Jim O’Neill, Group IT Manager with the Kepak Group said “it became apparent that our existing Lamb kill line system had approached end of life and additionally any changes required for future advancements would be difficult to undertake. Accompany this with further enhancements at both the Lairage stage (AIM’s and Bord Bia checks) and floor based data collection terminals (QC based activity) as well as the fact we use Emydex now door-to-door it became an easy decision to make.”

O’Neill added “On ‘go-live’ everything went smoothly in both Athleague and Hacketstown and I personally could not ask for more on this. The added fact that data is now more accessible / structured for reporting as well as having the full support of Emydex who understand the meat business is a huge help for any future regulatory changes or internal customisation and it has proven an extremely successful rollout for Kepak on not just the lamb but also the beef implementations to date.”

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