Dawn Meats Group<\/a> is a family-owned business\u202festablished in 1980 in Waterford, Ireland. The company has grown to become one of the largest and most important beef and sheep processing groups in the industry. The group employs over 8,000 people across twelve countries, including ten sites in Ireland and thirteen in the UK, and exports to over 50 countries worldwide.<\/p>\r\nEvery year, Dawn Meats Group processes over 1 million cattle and 3.5 million sheep, generating more than \u20ac2.5 billion in turnover for the company and contributing over \u20ac1.67 billion to rural economies through 30,000 farms in Ireland and the UK.<\/p>\r\n
The numbers are staggering, and so is their success.<\/p>\r\n
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The Opportunity<\/h3>\r\n
Dawn Meats developed its own in-house quality management system, which largely relied on manual, paper-based checks throughout its factory floors.<\/p>\r\n
While this was rigorous and helped to maintain the company’s highest quality products, it was inefficient, creating delays, tons of paper, and hours of data entry. The old manual way of working involved lengthy printing, handing out, filling in, returning, checking, countersigning, and storing paper records. On top of that, files had to be physically retrieved in the event of an\u202faudit or to trend data.<\/p>\r\n
For the past decade (since 2013), Emydex has been developing an Electronic Quality Management System (EQMS) capable of being used in single plants as well as across multi-plant group processors like Dawn Meats Group<\/p>\r\n
Emydex’s Quality Management System is a software system that allows food processors carry out their factory and food safety quality and audit checks on tablets, reporting instantly in the back-office, replacing all paper-based quality check sheets on the factory floor.<\/p>\r\n
A perfect fit for Dawn Meats Group.<\/p>\r\n
“\u200bWe selected Emydex, a long-standing partner of ours, due to Emydex’s understanding of our food production facilities, their excellent software development ability and personal project management delivery,”<\/em> said Julia Hewerdine, Group Food Safety & Quality Project Manager in Dawn Meats Group.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n
There were several drivers behind Dawn Meats Group’s decision to select Emydex:<\/p>\r\n
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One System<\/h3>\r\n
The first was Emydex gave Dawn Meats Group one single system, with Emydex’s quality module sitting alongside all other Emydex factory floor MES, Production and Warehouse Management modules on one common platform.<\/p>\r\n
“We have worked with Emydex over the past decade on the production and traceability side, so we trust them”, <\/em>commented John Coleman, Dawn Group Food Safety and Quality Manager.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n
Cloud or On-Premises<\/h3>\r\n
The EQMS system can be installed on-premises or in the cloud. Emydex doesn’t force its customers to operate their QMS out of the cloud; they can install it on-prem if necessary.<\/p>\r\n
“Emydex has had a tremendous impact on our shop floor quality data collection on site, as well as safeguarding completion of checks in a scheduled and timely manner. \u202fIts reliability and speed have ensured that workflows carried out have been given full attention, and no corners are cut.” <\/em>said Alan McCormack, Dawn Meats Technical Team<\/strong><\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n