Beef
Ashbourne Meat Processors
A leader in the supply of quality Irish beef products
Ashbourne Meat Processors is one of Ireland’s most successful exporters of premium chilled beef products. Founded in 1985, the company exports high-quality products all over the world and is proud to be recognised as a family whose expertise and knowledge is passed down from one generation to another. There are nearly 200 people in the company family working in two facilities in the centre of Ireland – Roscrea (slaughtering and cold-storage facilities) and Naas (deboning and cold storage).
Ashbourne Meat Processors is a firm believer in leveraging advanced technology and production facilities.

What Ashbourne Meat Says
“The savings in administration were immediate – we saved a labour unit in the office immediately – and the piles of paperwork and stacks of files are a thing of the past. We’re almost paperless now, except for the cheques which some of our more traditional farming suppliers prefer over electronic payments. I estimate that actual physical paperwork has decreased by 95% and that’s a huge achievement.”
PJ Butler, Roscrea Plant Manager, Ashbourne Meat Processors
Challenge
Ashbourne Meat Processors’ two plants were essentially working in isolation from each other on outdated systems that required a lot of manual input and data entry. The abattoir in Roscrea would take in livestock and create the relevant paperwork. When the carcasses were transferred to Ashbourne Meat Processors’ facility in Naas (and to other facilities operated by the company’s clients all over the country), new paperwork would have to be created. This was extremely inefficient and left the company open to human error, duplication and lack of visibility and control.
There were also issues with compliance as the legacy systems used in both operations were not integrated with the Department of Agriculture systems and so there was a need for even more data entry.
Solution
Emydex is the acknowledged leader when it comes to process development for the food industry and when Ashbourne Meat Processors decided to overhaul the IT infrastructure and embrace the latest processing technology, they called Emydex.
Following a project scoping exercise, the team agreed to divide the job into two phases – one for the slaughter plant in Roscrea and the other for the Deboning operation in Naas. Connecting the two facilities was an obvious but important improvement.
In phase one, The Naas Deboning operation was upgraded by Emydex to deliver an end-to-end factory floor solution. Today Emydex handles the entire processing procedures within this plant, from Intake, Into / Out of Boning, Packing, Dispatch and Warehousing. Emydex also generates all the appropriate Dispatch Documentation, transfers traceability data to customers and allows for full forward and backward traceability. Prior to Emydex’s introduction, Work Orders were paper-based and were phoned down to the operators. Now this is all controlled within Emydex which means there is less likelihood of human error and the whole process is now more streamlined and controlled.
In phase two, the abattoir and cold storage facility 100 kilometres away in Roscrea, County Tipperary, was completely overhauled with everything from animal intake, supplier POs, inter-company paperwork and all procedures – from processing to packing, including sales picking – newly streamlined and automated. Labelling from boning through storage and out in orders was part of the specification as was the automatic electronic generation of all documentation. Real-time data is now updated constantly between the two plants and a new dispatch system created.
Outcome
Animal intake at the abattoir is now seamlessly and automatically integrated with the Government’s veterinary body, AIMS. Ear tags are scanned and all animal data is confirmed and registered and the Department of Agriculture is notified automatically. This improvement alone saves thousands of man-hours every year and completely eliminates human error at the intake point.
There used to be two separate systems and all sorts of mistakes were created by so much manual data entry. This led to delays in cattle payments and problems in registering the passport details of some animals. Now there is just one system and those errors have been eliminated.
Everything from animal intake to carcass dispatch and box generation is automated, tracked, reported and visible all the way from start to finish.
Overall, and almost immediately, efficiency was improved, paperwork virtually eliminated, errors drastically reduced, and profitability increased throughout the company.
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Find Out MoreWilson Hellaby
A supplier of top quality beef, lamb, pork & goat meat
Wilson Hellaby has a proud history which can be traced back to 1873 - when the Hellaby's first butchery opened. Today, the company is owned by both the Syminton and Hellaby families who have been delivering meat to New Zealanders for years.
The Wilson Hellaby brand represents a long tradition and focuses on sourcing the highest quality livestock from family farmers across New Zealand.
Wilson Hellaby, a group of companies, is the trading arm of the business, sourcing livestock and delivering products to customers. With Auckland Meat Processors & Ruakura Meat processors processing Beef, Lamb, Pork & goat exporting their product across the globe and a food service division dedicated to meeting the needs of hotels, caterers, hospitals and other foods outlets.

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Find Out MoreSilver Fern Farms
New Zealand’s largest livestock processing and marketing company
Founded in 1948, they are New Zealand's leading procurer, processor, marketer and exporter of premium quality lamb, beef and venison.
Their 'plate-to-pasture' strategy is how they make it happen - focusing first on identifying consumer needs, and then working with their farmers to grow animals and apply their expertise to meet those needs. They produce 30% of all New Zealand lamb, beef and venison Across 14 plants with 7,000 staff in the peak of the season.

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Find Out MoreHarvey Beef
One of Australia's leading beef processing facilities
In operation since 1919, Harvey Beef is located in the town of Harvey, south of Perth in Western Australia. Part of Harvest Road Group and privately owned by the Minderoo Group, Harvey Beef is Western Australia’s leading beef processor. Stretching across 1.2 million hectares of pastoral farmland, Minderoo cattle stations are dedicated to producing high-quality beef for both domestic and export consumption.
Harvey Beef were previously using a legacy factory floor software system comprising a number of software modules including data capture, labeling and 3rd party barcode scanning, that were integrated to their back-office Microsoft Dynamics Nav ERP system.

What Harvey Beef Says
“I think we can say the kill line go-live went pretty well. On week 1, we achieved within 100 head of our maximum capacity which is a good effort for a change this big. The staff are very positive with the result. Everyone can see it is a better system. By weeks end the system was having no negative impact on throughput speed with the kill line system operating at speed, and operators up to speed with using it. Overall a great outcome."
Wayne Shaw, General Manager of Harvey Beef
Challenge
Due to the aging of the current system, difficulty of upgrading, and rapid growth within the business, a review was undertaken to determine the best course regarding their future IT systems, whether to upgrade or invest in a new system. Opting for the latter option Harvest Road, in December 2017, invited Emydex to submit a proposal to supply and implement a software system that would improve their ability to address their current issues and support growth plans. After the publication and evaluation of an RFP, and a competitive tender process, Emydex was selected to provide the full end to end factory floor processing system, in tandem with Empired being selected to implement Nav 2018 as their choice of back-office ERP system to cater for Harvest Road’s core financials and non-meat inventories.
Solution
The key objective of the project was to deliver an integrated system where data is entered only once, with users having access to real-time, accurate inventory. Visibility of information across the organisation, along with visibility of stock produced to orders and availability of stock for dispatch, were all key requirements. The system also needed to be able to support new and changing business requirements, increase productivity, reduce inefficiency, and facilitate options for automation and cost savings.
Outcome
Commenting on the project phases delivered to date, Lorna Daly, Head of Emydex Australia operations said,
“Following the Emydex roll-outs over the course of 2018 and early 2019, Harvest Road today has a robust end-to-end Factory Floor data capture system that delivers data on-time and accurately. They have more control over data going through the kill line as data is consistent between appointments, delivery and graded information. Real-time data for inventory, yields and market pricing, allows for better decision making and view of stock coming close to being out of date. This has led to increased confidence in key metrics, such as stock on hand. Staff now have a modern system and direct access to data, meaning Traceability reports are easy and quick to run.”
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Find Out MoreDanish Crown
The world's largest pork exporter
When Danish Crown approached Emydex about designing and implementing a kill line system on a pilot basis for their plant in Hörby, naturally we were very interested in talking to them.
After all, Danish Crown is one of Europe’s largest meat processing companies and the world’s largest pork exporter. As a group it is involved in a long list of other food products with subsidiaries that include a number of very well-known names in the industry: Friland, KLS Ugglarps, Scan-Hide, Tulip Food Company, Tulip Ltd (UK), Sokolow, Dat-Schaub, ESS-FOOD and WestCrown.
Danish Crown was established in 1887 by Denmark’s first co-operative meat company and today has market access to more than 130 countries around the world. It has sites spread across 10 countries in mainland Europe, the UK and most recently China. Working with this blue-chip organisation presented a great opportunity for Emydex.

What Danish Crown Says
"From day one we were able to slaughter and process more animals than usual. The kill line didn’t stop as it usually might, and everything was more stable and more efficient from the get-go. Our operators are very pleased with the solution… it has a nice interface and does its job very well. They didn’t need much training at all because the screen tells everyone what they need to do and when.
Efficiency and ease of use is why I recommended it to our other facilities around the world. Plus Emydex service is very good, they react very well to our requests and are getting better and better at what they do as they scale up with us. They listen, respond and react and that’s why we are taking them out of the pilot phase and into our group operations worldwide.
(It is) a good system with a great overview with all the information we need at our fingertips. Inventory overview, for example, is now an easy thing for everyone to see immediately. Emydex gives us data we never really had access to and that means innovation and growth is coming to us too, bringing maturity to our own factory here.”
Henrik Frøsig, Director, Solutions & Innovation, Global IT, Danish Crown
Challenge
A challenge for Danish Crown was that through acquisition of processing plants around the globe, their factories use various software solutions of different origin and version, which were difficult to for their Global IT team to manage, as they weren’t integrated, and so some factories were not running as efficiently as they could be.
Solution
We assembled a project team of Emydex solution engineers and managers working in Dublin and Danish Crown’s central IT team working in Denmark and they collaborated to commission and configure a state-of-the-art Emydex software solution for the Hörby plant.
The new system featured a number of Emydex modules including Beef and Lamb Kill Line, Primary Packing and Processing, Yield Reporting, Carcass Management and Order Processing/ ERP Integration.
One of the more important elements we had to include was integrating with the Swedish Central Animal Database (CDB) which enables files sent by the government listing every live beef animal to be imported into Emydex. When animals are entered at the stables as they arrive at the factory, their ear tags can be validated against the central database.
Outcome
Hörby now has a robust factory floor solution and the most immediate result has been increased productivity for KLS Ugglarps and Danish Crown.
“With the new Emydex system one of the added benefits is that it enables vet inspections all along the kill line in real-time. Hide processing has increased visibility and carcass intake is smoother via ASN or parse barcodes which eliminates onerous data entry” said Shane Hayes, Business Analyst/Technical Sales with Emydex
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