Australasia

Emydex New Hires in Dublin, Australia & North America

17 December 2018

In line with continued growth and expansion, mainly in overseas core markets, Emydex is pleased to announce new hires across the board, joining the Emydex Project Management, Development, EQMS and Customer Support teams over the past few months.

Project Managers

Ann-Marie Caffrey joined the Project Delivery Team in September 2018. Ann-Marie has a Degree in Information Technology from Dublin City University and previously worked for Hewlett Packard as Senior IT Project Manager.

Ciara McIvor joined the Project Management Team of Emydex Dublin in August 2018. Ciara has a Master’s Degree in Project Management and over 5 years project management experience.

Development Team

Robin O’Neill joined Solution Delivery Team in June 2018. Robin studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Leeds and has over 10 years Software Development experience in all aspects of the software development lifecycle.

Ekaterina Pushkina, joined the Solutions Delivery Team of Emydex Dublin in October 2018. Kate has a Master’s Degree and over 18 years Software Development experience.

Varun Kasana, joined the Products Division Team. Kasana has a Master’s in Computer Science and has over 8 years’ Development experience.

Jose Rubio joined the Development Team in January 2019. Jose has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and moved to Ireland in 2011, working as a Software Engineer since 2012, and as a Team Lead since 2016.

Rory McGarrigle joined the Development Team in January 2019. Rory is an experienced software developer with over eight years’ experience across a wide variety of technologies, delivering challenging projects.

EQMS Team

Agnieszka Kregiel-Grzyb joined Emydex as an intern whilst completing a Software Development trainee course. Previously she worked in customer service for 8 years and completed a Management course in DIT. Most recently Agnieszka completed a Higher Diploma in Science in Computing at NCI.

Brian Shortall joined Emydex as a member of the Product Delivery Team. Brian has a Master’s Degree in Web Technologies and is currently working as a Software Developer as part of Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) project.

Support Team

Robert Timmons Holds an Honours degree in Software Engineering from IT Carlow. He has a passion for tracking down and fixing the root cause for issues that arise and resolving customer issues as fast and as efficient as possible.

Jonas Betancor De Leon Originally from Lanzarote, Canary Islands, has an Aviation Management Degree from UAM and a Higher Diploma in Science in Computing from Institute of Technology Blanchardstown.

Emydex Australia

Alan Doocey moved to Australia from Ireland in June 2018 to join the Australian support and implementation team. Alan was previously the IT Manager for Dawn Pork and Bacon.

Ajay Kakumani, joined the Solutions Team of Emydex Australia in October 2018. Ajay has a Bachelor’s Degree and more recently a Post Grad. Diploma in Computer Science and has over 7 years’ Technical experience, most recently as Integration Specialist with Activate Technologies Ltd.

Emydex North America

Recruitment is ongoing to grow our team in North America.

Emydex Australasia Market Update

13 November 2018

Emydex Australia today announces the move to larger corporate offices in The Precinct in Central Brisbane. Located at 14 Browning Street, the new Emydex Australia Head-office is only a 5 min walk to South Brisbane train station, as well as Brisbane river walk that runs through Brisbane city.

The move coincides with a ramp up of the Emydex Australia team, with recent hiring of three new local software engineers, two of whom will join the Emydex Australia Solutions Implementation team, as well as one joining the local technical support team. This brings the total Emydex Australia headcount to eight, including local employees as well as a number of Emydex Ireland employees on secondment to Australia.

The Emydex Australia dedicated support team, works in tandem with the Emydex Ireland support team to provide 24x7 support coverage to Emydex customers located in 14 countries around the world. Recruitment is ongoing presently in Toronto, Canada, to add further support technicians to the global support team based there, for seamless 24x7 coverage for Emydex customers by way of 3 x 8 hour support shifts.

(Some of the Emydex Australia Team with David and James visiting from Ireland.)

Emydex signed its first Australian customer, Junee Lamb in New South Wales, in early 2015. Despite locating its head-office in Brisbane since then, Emydex Australia only recently added their first Queensland processing customer to the customer mix in September 2018, signing contracts with the Sunpork Group. Sunpork Group are the largest Australian owned pig producer and processor, with head-office operations located in Murarrie, Brisbane. Emydex are contracted to supply a factory floor data-capture, production control and traceability reporting MES system to service a new state-of-the-art Kill Floor and Boning room operations at the Swickers processing plant located in Kingaroy, three hours outside Brisbane.

Our most recent go live was Harvey Beef, based in Western Australia. Part of Harvest Road Group and privately owned by the Minderoo Group, Harvey Beef is Western Australia’s leading beef processor. In December 2017, Emydex were invited to submit a proposal to supply and implement a software system which 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.

Other Emydex customers in Australia include Wodonga Abattoir in Wodonga, O’Connor Beef in Packenham, as well as Victoria Valley Meat Exporters all based in Victoria.

Commenting on the recent expansion of its operations in Australasia, David McMahon, Emydex technology CEO based in Dublin, Ireland said “Australasia is one of three key export markets we are focussed on right now in addition to Africa and North America. Brisbane appears to have a ready supply of software engineers and technicians, compared with Ireland where they are in scarce supply. To the end, the plan is for the Emydex Australia team to grow in size, not just to cater for our customers based in this region, but also to support our global customers, as well as to participate in a number of New Product development projects we are planning to deliver over the next 18 months.

These include Group Production planning and Animal payment systems geared at larger multi-site group processors”. He added “Our vision is to become the No.1 partner of choice for Traceability, Quality and Production control systems with leading meat, fish and food processors in our four key global markets. To achieve this means a need to maintain sharp focus on our core product and service offerings, customers and markets, working with local partners in each region for both Industrial hardware and back-office ERP systems integration”

For more information on Emydex Australia, please contact Ian Carson at ian.carson@emydex.com.au

Kill Line Live in Central Agri Group, Victoria, Australia

21 August 2018

In 2016 Central Agri Group, formerly Central Meat Exports, re-opened their newly refurbished beef plant in Trafalgar as Victoria Valley Meat Exports. This is a state of the art, fully integrated, beef processing plant in Victoria, Australia. As part of the Central Agri Group of companies, VVME is focused on major export markets including the Middle East and South East Asia.

Having been in operation for several months, it was determined that the current systems did not meet the needs of this modern, export focussed business, as the various modules were not integrated and lacked the features found in a modern, integrated system. Processes such as interfacing to the NLIS database, preparing the kill agenda, generating payments and reporting were all complicated and in some cases completely manual.

In light of these requirements, VVME contacted Emydex with a view to replacing their existing system, starting with the slaughter floor and then moving on to the boning hall including stations for into-boning, offal packing and carcass dispatch, with carton dispatch to follow.

Kill Line Software

The kill floor went live recently with Emydex’s kill line software systems running on four on-floor data capture computers starting from an NLIS scanning station that checks the animal status in real -time against the NLIS database through to Dentition, Carcass defect and Weigh-Grading stations.

The Emydex back-office system allows for the kill agenda to be generated from bookings made earlier, many of which are themselves created by a direct import of the XML ‘purchase advice’ from the various sale-yards, with all associated costs and individual animal RFID details attached.

Data from the slaughter floor is approved, which then generates a payment invoice (recipient created tax invoice) to the supplier with very little manual manipulation using flexible payment grids. The kill data is loaded directly from Emydex to the NLIS database again streamlining the processes and adding efficiencies.

Electronic Quality Management System

With the slaughter floor fully live, the company is now moving ahead to implement the next phases over the next few months. The final step will be to incorporate the Emydex ‘Quality Management’ system which will integrate the Production processes with a Quality system which, being Cloud based, could potentially be expanded to include Central Agri Groups other processing facilities in other locations.

Commenting shortly after the initial Emydex system go-live at the plant, Colin Reidy, IT and QA Manager for the Central Agri Group stated:

“To be honest, that was the smoothest rollout I have ever been involved in. Even if you take the minor changes performed today, the system worked as intended with little to no intervention.

Ian’s knowledge combined with Carl’s skills made the last few improvements today practical and worthwhile.

The operators all responded positively and actively engaged with both the Emydex team and the software system.

As for the office, I walked in at 5am as normal and 5 mins later I ran out of things to do. Normally I am hard pressed to have the agenda out by 6:15 let alone get any QA checks done. Then this afternoon, after a couple hours playing with the pricing we had the final feedbacks done by 2:30pm - a task that quite easily takes me to 6pm most nights.

So to say I’m happy is an understatement.”

Emydex Door-to-Door in Junee Lamb, NSW, Australia

10 May 2018

Emydex complete the system implementation with new customer in Australia, Junee Lamb, NSW

Junee Lamb is one of New South Wales’ leading sheep meat processors and exporters. With a focus on high quality chilled lamb for the domestic market as well as having significant export sales, Junee process over 3500 head of lambs daily. Junee also provides a service kill and boning operation for other customers such as major supermarket chains who wish to market their own product. All product is certified Halal and some product is processed as organic lamb.

Factory Floor Production Control System

Junee Lamb had a requirement to upgrade their existing factory floor production control system at the plant in Junee, as well as their Sydney wholesale and further processing systems, to a modern, flexible, user-friendly system which fully integrates all processes required for the procurement, slaughter, processing and sale of meat products.

Previously the company were operating with two separate factory floor data collection systems that were disconnected, and the company realised it would be more beneficial to their business to upgrade these systems to a single production management solution, offering one version of the truth, that could be tailored and customised to suit their specific business requirements.

Junee Lamb needed a system that would integrate with their existing back-office financial system, and also needed to incorporate an off-the-shelf label design system that allowed for the integration of foreign text in multiple languages, such as Arabic and Chinese.

Over the past 12 months, Emydex software engineers based in Australia, installed their Manufacturing Execution System (MES) across the entire business operations, including the lamb factory and wholesale centre. Emydex software modules implemented includes the Emydex Kill line & Payments module for stock procurement and payment, Carcass Management Module, Processing & Packing Module used for boning room production management, and the weigh-labelling of product, as well as the Emydex Warehouse Management module, used to manage and report on all factory stocks.

Many benefits have accrued from the implementation of Emydex, including the ability to cost stock purchased prior to processing, to determine a forward selling price. Another benefit is providing detailed costings reporting once skin returns, credits as well as all purchasing costs are known. Feedback to service kill operators and suppliers can be produced as soon as a lot is complete and emailed to customers.

For the domestic trade, the ability to quickly enter orders, and to produce consolidated production requirements and picking sheets, allows the orders to be accumulated during the day. Hanging product is weighed across an Emydex terminal, so invoices can be produced by delivery run from the terminal, as soon as loading is complete. This ensures accurate documentation is produced with invoices travelling with the deliveries. Similar functionality in the Sydney operation has allowed for significant growth with continued customer satisfaction.

Junee are a market-driven company who enjoy a reputation for top quality product and are seen as a market leader, especially into to the Asian market where the Junee Gold brand is recognised as one of the premier Australian brands. Consequently, virtually all stock is produced to order and is often labelled with customer order information (such as port marks) and often have complex, multi-language multi-label requirements.

Centralised Specification System

A key benefit of the system is having one centralised ‘specification’ system, where labels designs are stored with foreign text generated from the product specifications ‘real time’ using the actual text and thus not requiring images or conversion codes. All customer production requirements can be entered into a plan, which in turn generates the daily works orders, touch screen product buttons, all of which are linked to sales orders and labelling requirements. Order requirements eliminate costly over-production, and allow order fulfilment and shipping to be easily managed.

End to End Solution

By providing a fully integrated, ‘end to end’ solution Emydex have provided a platform where efficiencies have been gained in all areas of the business and allow for information to be readily available. Ease of use has ensured user acceptance has been high with minimal impact on the day to day running of the business as the system was rolled out. With 24-hour support in place, Junee can be assured that support is available 24x7 to provide comfort as the company goes ahead with plans to greatly expand the business over the next 12 months.

‘Having run the business across a number of disjointed systems previously, with little by way of fast-responding support, the business has greatly benefitted from have one, fully integrated, easy to use system. Testament to this is our recent and continuing smooth expansion, maintaining our reputation for top quality products and service. The Emydex system has provided significant benefits from its flexibility, ease of use and ability grow as we do. With Emydex now managing our ‘pasture to plate’ processes we feel confident we can meet the challenges as we expand into the future’.
Heath Newton, Managing Director - Junee Lamb

For enquiries contact sales@emydex.com or call Emydex on contact us

Emydex Traceability in Tuna Processor in Philippines

16 February 2018

Meliomar Inc. is a tuna and seafood processing and export company based in Manila, Philippines. Meliomar focus on the development and trade of responsibly produced and high quality sustainable seafood, sourced from small-scale fisheries from areas throughout the Philippines.

Meliomar is a commercial partner of the Artsemar program for fisheries improvement run by Blueyou Consulting, based in Switzerland. By creating direct market access for seafood caught by smallholder fishers, the Artesmar initiative promotes the development of more sustainable business and fishing practices.

Meliomar traceability tagging

Blueyou leads and participates in Fishery Improvement Projects, one of which projects was to implement an Emydex electronic data capture production control system in the Meliomar operation to replace their existing manual system. They were also looking for a comprehensive real-time Traceability system to replace their manual paper-based system for traceability recording and reporting.

Door-to-door Factory Floor System

Emydex implemented their Intake, Packing & Processing, Order Management and Warehouse Management software modules to cover Meliomar’s factory floor processes, from factory door-to-door including Procurement, Reception, Manufacturing, Packing, Sales Order Picking and Dispatch. As part of the implementation Emydex also built a series interfaces to their back-office ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

As Meliomar source fish from a multitude of suppliers and fishermen, Tuna ID tags are recorded as the fish are purchased. Each ID tag has a unique number made up of a location code and a consecutive number. Data capture and quality data is recorded at intake using a fixed position weighing station. Four labels are printed for each fish at intake, one for each loin, to ensure traceability is fully maintained throughout processing, using 2D Barcodes.

Meliomar’s business processes required Emydex to be more flexible in their approach to the system design, including the requirement to pack directly to Sales Orders pulled from NAV, as opposed to packing to stock.

Another requirement was the need to perform both Intake and Dispatch in off-line mode, as well as online (via wi-fi and network), due to poor internet connection in one of their factories. Meliomar needed functionality that allowed the creation of Purchase Orders and printing pallet labels on-site, and then load the POs onto a hand-held scanner.

The scanner and labels are later brought to a separate frozen storage facility, where they label pallets, enter the number of boxes on that pallet, and scan the pallet against a PO. When they get back to the main site, the data is then synced, and the data can be viewed on the system.

Predictive Re-Ordering

A key feature of this project was predictive re-ordering, which is based on average usage of a selected frozen product based on previous usage levels. Additional functionality allows them to optionally set a multiplier for a given week, in the event that they think they will be using more than the predicted amount for any given week. They can also set lead times for each product and receive warnings indicating that they will need to make a purchase order to maintain sufficient stock, or forecast when they will be out of stock, ensuring they have full visibility over stock levels at all times.

Production and Traceability Reporting System

Meliomar now have a comprehensive Production control & Traceability reporting system operating on the factory floor from door to door. By migrating from a manual system to an electronic data capture production reporting system and implementing an Emydex traceability system, this allows Meliomar to reliably trace all tuna products direct from their origin.

Commenting on the project, Christian Schmidradner, Meliomar General Manager said “Trust in the system is fast growing and the teams see how much less work is involved in processes (before handwritten and Excel inputted numbers in the thousands in forms, tedious hand-written reports to cross check for accounting and traceability purposes) and they have started to appreciate the system. We are very happy with the new system and I want to thank the Emydex team for their dedication and intensive work on customising and implementing our system over the last year”.

David McMahon, Emydex CEO added “the Meliomar system build was an interesting project in that the project was led for the customer by the BlueYou Consulting team in Switzerland, with the end-user and factory operations based in Manila, Philippines. Full credit to the combined project management and technical delivery teams for the successful configuration and implementation of a tailored Emydex factory floor solution for Meliomar, including integration to 3rd party industrial equipment and back-office systems, without ever having to visit the Philippines”.

For enquiries contact sales@emydex.com or call Emydex on contact us

EMYDEX TO EXHIBIT AT FIELDAYS EXPO, NEW ZEALAND, JUNE 2017

14 April 2017

WAIKATO - NEW ZEALAND:

Emydex Technology, with its head-quarters in Dublin Ireland, today announced plans to exhibit at the 2017 Fieldays exposition taking place at Mystery Creek in Hamilton, Waikato, North Island New Zealand from 14 – 17 June 2017.

Visit us at the The Ireland National Stand, No. D67-D73

Fielday - Largest Agricultural Trade Show in Southern Hemisphere.

Fieldays is the largest agricultural trade show taking place in the Southern Hemisphere. The agribusiness event attracts over 120,000 visitors and 1000 exhibitors each year.

Emydex’s local market distributor for Australasia, Ian Carson, based in Brisbane Australia, will be present on the Emydex stand for the duration of the show. The Emydex stand will form part of the larger Ireland Agribusiness village hosted by Irish Government agency Enterprise Ireland. As part of the Irish Agribusiness pavilion Enterprise Ireland will also be running a series of evening networking events to which customers, suppliers and interested parties will be invited to join.

Commenting on the expo, Mary Kinnane Enterprise Ireland Director for Australia/New Zealand said “Enterprise Ireland are delighted to have Emydex join other Agribusiness companies exhibiting on the Irish Agribusiness stand this year. I met with Emydex when they traveled extensively around Western and Eastern Australia this time last year, as well as both of New Zealand’s North and South Islands. Since then they now have three separate Australian meat processing plants and a distribution centre all running their Factory Floor Production control and Traceability reporting software systems with many other great opportunities in the pipeline.”

Ireland Agribusiness Stand at Fieldays 2016

On the Emydex stand, Ian Carson and colleagues will have Emydex software demonstrations to hand of Emydex software systems configured specifically for the Australasian markets such as:

Abattoir System

Kill Line & Animal Payments software including:

The ability to record small stock EID data on the slaughter floor once this is compulsory.
NLIS database interface inbuilt in the system negating the need to use any 3rd party applications
An MLA certified eNVD solution integrated to the NLIS database and which provides the ability to create appointments from the eNVD data.
Flexible ‘three level’ payment grid with a second ‘fall through’ grid for animal that do not meet the criteria on the primary grid applied to the purchase.
Settlement schemes that automatically apply charges and rebates to supplier invoices associated with that scheme
A payment system that can pay Farmers (RCTI), Hobby Farmers (no GST), Agents etc.
AusMeat chiller assessment or a simply ‘grade only’ system

Emydex Kill line Grading Station

Boning Hall System

Packing & Processing software system module that includes:

Labelling of boxes, crates, packs, pallets, bins, containers
Input to/output from any manufacturing process
Process Yield Reporting
Control production against work orders (optional)
Capture and report on information by Department, Processing Line, machine /cooker / operator, lot / batch etc
Maintains full product traceability through processes

fieldday_packing

Emydex Packing & Weigh-Labelling Systems

Warehouse Management Systems

Warehouse Management System & Sales Order Processing
OzDocs Export Documentation
Inter-site Transfers
Inventory Stock reporting system, real-time visibility of stocks
Automatic stock reconciliations with Cold Stores, reducing time taken to track and reconcile external stock
Dual Units of Measure
Forwards and Backwards Traceability
Stock Maps – graphical queries of stock statuses
Handheld Scanning Application – Sales order picking & dispatch, Stock movements

Emydex Handheld Warehouse Stock Scanning

Quality Management System

Quality Survey Production Calendars
Survey Scheduler including reminders of missed, overdue or incomplete surveys
Survey Alerts (red, amber, yellow) via email, text or on Emydex client PCs Quality Survey Builder & Editor
Plant overview and location drill-down maps
Capture text, temperature, pictures, select from lists, Yes/No check boxes
Real-time data collection
Corrective Action Preventative Action (CAPA) workflow
Technical Department Document Management System
Real-time data retrieval of data captured by other Emydex modules installed e.g., product detail look-ups via bar-code scanning
Real-time data validation checks
Operates on both fixed position and portable data capture devices

Emydex on mobile devices

Emydex Quality Surveys running on mobile tablet device

Software Demonstration

To book a software demonstration, please contact Ian Carson, Emydex Australasia distributor on:
Ian Carson ian.carson@emydex.com.au
Mt Nebo, Queensland, Australia 4520
T: + 61 (7) 3289 8336
M: + 61 4566 31662