Further Processing
Irish Casings
SunPork Fresh Foods
The largest supplier of Australian Pork in Queensland
Through Swickers Kingaroy, SunPork is the largest pig processor in all of Australia, handling 900,000 pigs every year to produce 18% (42 million kilos) of the nation’s pork. The group is proud to be Australian farmer-owned and a direct employer of 1,400 people across the country.
In addition to the domestic market, SunPork exports 7 million kilos of pork to seven other countries and creates 140 million meals worldwide annually. They do this through 37 Australian farms in three states and six New Zealand farms on the two islands. They also have three feed-mills, a directly owned abattoir, major interest in a second facility, as well as two value-add facilities.
What SunPork Says
"I would absolutely recommend Emydex because they have invested their time and resources in our business… it means as much to them as it does to us. Some of their guys came out and spent a month working at the coal face and we couldn’t ask for more commitment than that."
Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary
Challenge
Following the rebuild of the Export Boning Room after a fire at SunPorks’s Swickers abattoir in Queensland, the group began an additional AUD$ 64m (Euro €40m) investment in a new state-of-the-art facility in 2016. It set out to become the most efficient pork processing line in Australia with a capacity to process up to 750 pigs per hour, whilst maintaining a relentless focus on quality.
In December 2019, the SunPork Group completed the Swickers abattoir expansion in Kingaroy, located three hours outside Brisbane, Queensland, creating more than 200 jobs in the process.
So how do you become the fastest and most efficient pork processing facility in the country? You bring in one of the world’s leading providers of factory floor software for food processors. You bring in Emydex.
Following the rebuild of the Export Boning Room after a fire at SunPorks’s Swickers abattoir in Queensland, the group began an additional AUD$ 64m (Euro €40m) investment in a new state-of-the-art facility in 2016. It set out to become the most efficient pork processing line in Australia with a capacity to process up to 750 pigs per hour, whilst maintaining a relentless focus on quality.
In December 2019, the SunPork Group completed the Swickers abattoir expansion in Kingaroy, located three hours outside Brisbane, Queensland, creating more than 200 jobs in the process.
So how do you become the fastest and most efficient pork processing facility in the country? You bring in one of the world’s leading providers of factory floor software for food processors. You bring in Emydex.
Solution
The Sunpork project began with the design and development of a new state-of-the-art, fully automated kill line system for the Swickers processing plant, in line with Smart Manufacturing (Industry 4.0) best practice.
The main goal of this project was to interface the Emydex MES to an automated factory floor system consisting of a network of RFID readers and sensors, as well as multiple (20) in-line automated machines, connected to Emydex via the PLC layer. This meant integrating with equipment supplied by Frontmatec, Denmark, that included a carcass opener, automated splitting, AutoFom grader and a carcass stamp printer.
Other equipment included a PorkScan grader, automatic track scales as well as LED/Light and gate control systems, in addition to other devices to manage routing. The use of multiple real-time vet inspection and grading stations also controlled the flow and routing of carcasses.
RFID integration required the design and build of standard integrations (APIs) to interact with RFID tracking systems on the kill floor. The RFID system provides real-time carcass identification and tracking, enabling full traceability of the carcass throughout processing.
As part of the project, the Emydex engineering team also designed and built a new centralised communication service, called the Data Communication Interface (DCI). DCI eliminates the need for individual terminals to have direct communication with the various integrated hardware and allows terminals to receive the data input in a unified format via this single central communication point.
The project also delivered additional new innovative systems for stock delivery and pen management, automated carcass routing and an automated chiller sortation system based on configurable business rules.
Outcome
The effects were immediate, and the system keeps improving day by day.
“The new kill line is significantly more efficient than the previous line, and it will continue to improve as we move forward. Manpower has reduced in terms of two shifts to one, while the new floor will allow us double output. There are two real and obvious benefits that Emydex has brought to SunPork. One, we have more data points where we can collect manufacturing information from around the floor and two; we have replaced many manual tasks such as populating spreadsheets.
Geoff Miller, Group CFO and Company Secretary
“What makes the Swickers plant unique is that it not only processes product on behalf of SunPork, but also provides a service kill for other companies in the pork industry and so had to have a lot of flexibility not usually found in normal processing facilities. The need to meet the requirements of each customer utilising the service provided by the plant meant Emydex had to deliver a system that could not only operate at very high speed, but also deliver the ability to change the way each customer’s pigs were prepared and to signal this in real-time to the operators on the production floor”
Ian Carson, Technical Sales Director, Emydex Australia
What’s next?
The next phase is to refine and perfect Emydex’s ‘Factory of The Future system’ on the ground at Swickers and then roll Emydex systems out to further processing functions at Kingaroy and SunPork’s other facility in Queensland.
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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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Find Out MoreCranswick
A top food producer and supplier of added-value products
Based in England, Cranswick PLC was started when a group of passionate, British farmers came together in 1975. Then, in the 1980's, Cranswick moved into food production and introduced one of Britain's first ‘farm to fork’ offerings.
Today, the organisation is one of the largest food producers in the UK and it continues to stay true to its original ethos of creating authentic British food.
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Find Out MoreRosie & Jim
A rapidly growing processing company in Dublin
Rosie & Jim is an Irish food production company established in 1997 when award-winning Craft Butcher Jimmy McLoughin established Quality First Limited. He began producing gourmet chicken products for supply to butcher shops and restaurants. Before long, the rapidly growing business moved to larger premises in Inchicore, Dublin 8. At this point, Rosie joined to assist with running the business.
Rosie and Jimmy McLoughlin are a husband and wife team who share a passion for wholesome quality food.
Rosie and Jim supply distributors to the retail, food-service and catering trades with ready to cook chicken products such as Breaded fresh & Frozen Chicken products, Wraps & Pasties.
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 fulfill 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.
Working with Emydex
“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... Overall, I feel the project was a successful implementation, and the new system has been well received by our production team, operators and supervisors.”
Peter Turner, Financial Controller, Rosie & Jim
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