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Emydex New Hires in Dublin, Australia & North America

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.

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Emydex Australasia Market Update

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

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Emydex North America Market Update

Emydex Technology, a Dublin company specialising in Traceability Software for the food processing industry, have secured its third customer in the North American market. This contract brings to 120 the number of processing plants using Emydex software worldwide, in 14 countries. The company secured its first North American contract in Canada two years ago with pork processor Donald’s Fine Foods and has since closed a deal with Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco).

Emydex was established in 2004 by co-founders James Grennan and Redmond Burke to offer fish and pork producers and food processors an integrated production management system tailored to their needs.

Now led by chief executive David McMahon, Emydex employs more than 50 people at its Dublin headquarters and overseas offices in Canada, Australia and South Africa. The company’s factory- floor software is aimed primarily at large-scale processors. The software combines production control with traceability and quality reporting, yield analysis, stock and food safety management.

“We’ve now moved into the Saas (software as a service) space,” said McMahon.

“We are very focused on our three export markets: Africa, Australia and North America.

“We have spent 12 years developing solutions for 60 customers, with 120 plants around the world, and the question then became ‘what else do they need from us?’.

“We’ve spent the last two years building an online quality management system and that’s been really successful. We then went back to our customers with ten other products we were thinking of building and asked them ‘how interested are you?’.

“They came back and offered to help us with design and testing. So, we’re now working on three new products, two of which are Saas, for group production planning group animal payments and Factory of the Future.”

An export-led company, Emydex has customers in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Namibia. The firm targets countries with strong meat exports, a relatively low concentration of large-scale processors and a strong regulatory framework for food traceability.

Emydex is a client company of state agency Enterprise Ireland. “They have helped us with R&D grants for new product development and internationalisation grants to help market entry into our key new markets,” said McMahon.

Written by Elaine O’Regan – Sunday Business Post

The Business Post

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Kill Line Live in Central Agri Group, Victoria, Australia

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.”

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Keeping up with demand in North America

Over the past 2 years the meat, poultry and seafood industries in North America have seen positive production increases for all protein sectors. There is a general sense of optimism about the industry as they look forward to the future. Consumer consumption rates for meat, poultry and seafood continue to increase, creating increased demand in both domestic and international markets.

These increased demands have created a culture of unrelenting focus on operational efficiencies in processing plants. Companies are looking to technology to support measurement of current processes to support continual improvements.

Processors were pushed to make the most of good economic conditions in 2018 and into 2019, sales projections are up, acquisitions are occurring more frequently, and expansion is happening in the meat, poultry and seafood industry.

As baby boomers retire and millennials move into and up the organisation, protein processors need to rethink their approach for managing and measuring the efficiency of their production lines. As the labor market continues to tighten, protein processors will need automated measurement of their line results to minimise manual labor required and to be able to provide the instant feedback across the organisation.

Emydex Software enables processors to get continual feedback from the production floor and allow some of the management positions to work remotely, through access to the Emydex tools.

Running the right shop floor solution can streamline your processing and packaging operations, expedite recalls and accurately predict yields and cost productions. The current ERP solutions lack this functionality and require a solution like Emydex to address those deficiencies. North American Meat Processors are recognising that most ERP applications support the office needs but they do not meet the unique shop floor needs of a meat processor.

Emydex Technology specialise in Factory Floor Software for Food Processors and are focusing on North America as one of three core export markets. Having secured its third customer in the North American market, this latest contract brings to 120 the number of processing plants using Emydex software worldwide, in 14 countries. The company secured its first North American contract in Canada two years ago with pork processor Donald’s Fine Foods and has since closed a deal with Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco).

Terry McCorriston, Emydex North American Business Analyst and shop floor software vendor for the meat and seafood industry, previously worked as the director of CSB-Systems, and was IT Manager at J.M. Schneiders Inc., a large meat processor in Canada. Terry has spoken at numerous international conferences on the importance of product costing in the meat industry.

Terry is certified with APICS (American Production and Inventory Control Society), to be able to provide sound recommendations on supply chain and operational processes.

Terry has a passion for helping protein industry companies improve their operations with use of technology.

For more information on the Emydex system, contact local agent Terry McCorriston 

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

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

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