• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Careers | Contact |
  • About Us
    • Why Emydex
    • Our Team
    • Support
    • Video
  • Software
    • Core Platform
    • Modules
      • Carcass Management
      • Kill Line & Payments
      • Packing & Processing
      • Production Planning
      • Quality & Compliance
      • Recipe Formulation
      • Systems Integration
      • Traceability Reporting
      • Warehouse Management
      • Yields & Costings
    • Business Logic
    • Emydex BI
  • Industries
    • Beef
    • Lamb
    • Pork
    • Poultry
    • Fish and Seafood
    • Fresh Produce
    • Further Processing
    • Cold Storage
    • Other Processing
    • Your Role
      • Production Managers
      • Finance Managers
      • I.T. Systems Manager
      • Quality Manager
      • Warehouse Manager
  • Customers
  • Markets
    • Africa
    • Australasia
    • New Zealand
    • Europe
    • North America
  • News

Emydex

Food Processing Software Solutions

  • About Us
    • Why Emydex
    • Our Team
    • Support
    • Video
  • Software
    • Core Platform
    • Modules
      • Carcass Management
      • Kill Line & Payments
      • Packing & Processing
      • Production Planning
      • Quality & Compliance
      • Recipe Formulation
      • Systems Integration
      • Traceability Reporting
      • Warehouse Management
      • Yields & Costings
    • Business Logic
    • Emydex BI
  • Industries
    • Beef
    • Lamb
    • Pork
    • Poultry
    • Fish and Seafood
    • Fresh Produce
    • Further Processing
    • Cold Storage
    • Other Processing
    • Your Role
      • Production Managers
      • Finance Managers
      • I.T. Systems Manager
      • Quality Manager
      • Warehouse Manager
  • Customers
  • Markets
    • Africa
    • Australasia
    • New Zealand
    • Europe
    • North America
  • News
  • About Us
    • Why Emydex
    • Our Team
    • Support
    • Video
  • Software
    • Core Platform
    • Modules
      • Carcass Management
      • Kill Line & Payments
      • Packing & Processing
      • Production Planning
      • Quality & Compliance
      • Recipe Formulation
      • Systems Integration
      • Traceability Reporting
      • Warehouse Management
      • Yields & Costings
    • Business Logic
    • Emydex BI
  • Industries
    • Beef
    • Lamb
    • Pork
    • Poultry
    • Fish and Seafood
    • Fresh Produce
    • Further Processing
    • Cold Storage
    • Other Processing
    • Your Role
      • Production Managers
      • Finance Managers
      • I.T. Systems Manager
      • Quality Manager
      • Warehouse Manager
  • Customers
  • Markets
    • Africa
    • Australasia
    • New Zealand
    • Europe
    • North America
  • News

SunPork Fresh Foods

8th June 2020

Home / Customers / SunPork Fresh Foods

8th June 2020

SunPork Case Study

Pork & Processing
Australia

The largest supplier of Australian Pork in Queensland

Pork & Processing
Australia | Australasia
Multi-Site

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.

emydex-customer-logo-sunpork
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.

Our News

Industry Updates

SunPork

SunPork scales new heights

12th December 2019

Meet the client Through Swickers Kingaroy, SunPork is the largest pig processor in all of Australia, handling 900,000…

Find Out More
Dave

Emydex North America Market Update

31st October 2018

Emydex Technology, a Dublin company specialising in Traceability Software for the food processing industry, have secured its third…

Find Out More
central_agri_group_email_image

Kill Line Live in Central Agri Group, Victoria, Australia

21st August 2018

In 2016 Central Agri Group, formerly Central Meat Exports, re-opened their newly refurbished beef plant in Trafalgar as…

Find Out More
Emydex installed in Ireland’s Largest Pig Processor

Emydex installed in Ireland’s Largest Pig Processor

20th December 2017

Rosderra approached Emydex in 2015 with a view to replacing their existing traceability and production control systems operating…

Find Out More
MeatCo Factory Floor

Beef Processing Software Live in MeatCo Namibia

5th November 2016

WINDHOEK – NAMIBIA: The Emydex implementation team returned to Ireland after the latest phase of Emydex system deployments…

Find Out More
Mallons Products

Arthur Mallon’s fully operational with Emydex

26th August 2013

Arthur Mallon Foods specialise in the production of fresh, frozen and cooked sausages. They supply fresh and frozen…

Find Out More
Request a Demo
Our News

Industry Updates

flag-article_silverfern

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…

Find Out More
flag-article_NZ-open-ocean-mussels

Success in a Greenshell

22nd April 2022

Success in a Greenshell Whakatōhea is an indigenous New Zealand iwi (confederation of Māori tribes) centred around the…

Find Out More
ems_application

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…

Find Out More
A not from our CEO, David McMahon - Emydex

Emydex CEO Update

19th October 2021

A note from Emydex CEO, David McMahon The Emydex country teams, still mainly working from home, are busy…

Find Out More
desktop-mobile_cropped

Introducing Emydex Business Intelligence (BI)

3rd September 2021

Utilise Analytics to derive Insights into your production data The first step in this process is ensuring data…

Find Out More
Shipping_test3

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…

Find Out More
Newsletter

Find out more about us & what we can do for your business...

Primary Sidebar

Footer

Links

Privacy Statement

Terms of Use

Careers

Downloads

Your Business

Software

Modules

Job Roles

Industries

Our Markets

Ireland & EU

Australasia

Africa

Canada & North America

Newsletter

Find out more about us and what we can do for your business

Emydex Processing Software Solutions © 2022 | Website designed by Giant Elk Creative