LOBATSE/FRANCISTOWN/MAUN – BOTSWANA:
Established by the Parliament of the Republic of Botswana in 1966, the Botswana Meat Commission (BMC) procure, slaughter and process beef, as well as beef by-products for sale locally, regionally and internationally. BMC operate three abattoirs in Lobatse (main site and group head-office), Francistown and Maun, Botswana as well as a Tannery and Cannery in Lobatse. BMC also has cold storage facilities in South Africa with marketing subsidiaries in the UK, Germany, Holland and South Africa. Its two abattoirs in Lobatse and Francistown are licensed to sell in the EU as they meet all the EU animal welfare and food safety standards. BMC mostly exports to the EU and RSA.
In October 2014, one of Emydex’s international distributors, deployed the Emydex Packing & Processing Software module to eight Primal packing Industrial workstations in the Botswana Meat Commission’s main beef production plant in Lobatse, Botswana.
Emydex Primal Weigh-labelling system operating on eight industrial workstations
The Lobatse site is currently deboning 600 beef carcasses per day, producing over 15,000 primal pack labels. Each label is printed in ten separate languages including Arabic and Greek. Primal meat labels are printed with variable text incorporating formatting in compliance with the recent EU Food Allergen Labelling Regulation (EU directive 1169/2011).
Unlike their previous printing system BMC no longer need to define separate label templates for each product with fixed ingredient text. Instead the Emydex Packing system stores ingredient text as a variable against each product, thereby minimising the number of label templates required. BMC production managers and supervisors can identify any Allergens in the label ingredient text and highlight them in bold.
Mandatory country of origin labelling is accomplished by the Traceability recording functionality that is inherent within the Emydex Primal packing and labelling system.
Average label printing cycle time on Emydex factory floor application is 1.2 seconds, with physical label printing speeds averaging 1.8 seconds.
Commenting on the system go-live, Billy Mauco, IT manager with BMC said “Storing primal labels with variable text rather than fixed means we only need to maintain a fraction of the labels we previously supported. The new Emydex system also enables printing of variable labels in ten languages including Greek and Arabic, as well as font formatting, something our previous system could not do. Printing speeds are good, the system is robust and hassle-free.”
David McMahon, Emydex CEO added “one unique aspect of this recent Emydex project in Botswana is that our team managed to configure, test and deploy a BMC-tailored version of our Packing and Labelling software all via the Emydex cloud, without anyone from Emydex visiting Botswana. Ian Carson, one of our International distribution partners, sourced and installed all the industrial hardware required, following which Emydex installed and tested the system remotely in conjunction both BMC staff as well as our distributor. Even though the BMC’s ‘live’ Emydex system is today hosted on a local production server, alternately there’s no reason why it couldn’t have remained hosted in the cloud.”
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990
