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Arthur Mallon’s fully operational with Emydex

Mallons Brand

Arthur Mallon Foods specialise in the production of fresh, frozen and cooked sausages. They supply fresh and frozen pork, to the major Irish retailers and export frozen pork sausage to Holland. Mallon’s sausages have won multiple awards in Ireland, UK and France and have achieved two Great Taste Awards in 2012. They operate from a purpose built modern production facility in Hilden, Co. Monaghan.

Arthur Mallon Foods identified a requirement to upgrade their existing production management systems to a single production management system that was scalable and flexible to meet with growing demands for specific industry, customer and supplier requirements. They required a single system to manage and report on order control, stock control, recipe formulation, traceability, quality control and yield control. With these objectives in mind they contacted Emydex in 2012.

Phase 1 – In order to minimise disruption to normal day operations, the project was split into a number of smaller project phases. Starting at the end, in Phase 1 Emydex customised their Packing & Processing module to suit Mallon’s particular needs including features such as Unit, Box and Pallet Labelling. Packing stations allow operators to work to Packing Work Orders whilst enabling them to switch quickly between Work Orders.

As part of this same project phase, Emydex’s Warehouse Management module covering Dispatch was implemented ‘off-the-shelf’ with only a few tweaks required to meet their particular requirements. “The key point about Emydex software is the standard module offerings are very comprehensive and cover almost everything we need, and if they don’t have specifically what we need, it’s not a major hassle to change it” said Paul Kearney in Arthur Mallon Foods.

In parallel with the Emydex factory floor install

Mallons also upgraded their ERP system, and Emydex integrated seamlessly with this. Sales orders are keyed into their financial system and then sent directly to Emydex for order picking and dispatching. Purchase orders are generated within Emydex, and then exported to the financial system upon receipt of goods.

Phase 2 of the project covered Raw Material and Dry Goods Intake, as well as Issuing Stock into Production via handheld scanners to ensure stock levels are accurately maintained.

Phase 3, Emydex’s Recipe formulation system is currently being implemented, and about to go-live. This module will track and control the levels of ingredients being issued to recipes as well as the calculating yields from finished recipes. Implementing the recipe system will assist Arthur Mallon’s with Quality Control and Traceability reporting, as well as provide key information in real-time to the floor managers as to the performance of the line.

“Already we are seeing the advantages of having Emydex as well as the capabilities and possibilities for the future. With the software and the excellent backup and service from all the staff in Emydex we feel we have the complete package.” Paul Kearney
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Emydex Products Update

Emydex’s dedicated Product Development team of 5 developers now work out of a separate innovation centre located in Unit 13, Northwest Centre. The team have been busy over the past 6 months working on next our generation Emydex software systems including Emydex Standard Systems, an iteration of the Emydex platform hosted in the cloud (Emydex-On-Demand) as well as many more new features including a new direct label printing (DLP) engine. The product development team are also re-engineering our core internal tool chain and libraries with the creation of a new CCL (Common Core Libraries).

Emydex Standard Systems

As the Emydex platform has matured over the past 10 years, we have seen commonalities emerge in the features our customer’s request. Overtime, functionality has begun to gravitate towards a standardised set of rules and methodologies. In tandem we have asked by some food processors to provide Emydex systems with less reliance on customisation in favour of ease and speed of installation, deployment, usage and management.

Typically smaller to medium sizes food processors have enquired after such standardised systems. The Emydex Standard Systems (ESS) project takes all the Emydex experience and know-how gained in designing and deploying production management systems for our customers over the past 10 years, to produce our standard versions of each essential component within in a typical end-to-end food production process from Intake, through Into-Production, Packing, Labelling, Order Picking and Dispatch

Standard Intake: The goal of this project phase is to standardise the process of goods-in and quality control. We will take a number of different features from existing systems and blend them together to provide a standardised Intake module. This new module will be released on our MDA software (that can operate on Industrial PC terminals) and is broken down into the following deliverables:

  • Initial Intake
  • QC Hold and Intake Returns
  • QC Release
  • Post Intake / Raw Goods In

product_update

You may also notice we have done a lot of work around our new embedded scales indicator, including re-skinning and adding further validation functionality around limits and checks. This indicator is just one of the new standardised components being built in tandem with standard packing:

productupdate_02

Standard Warehousing: This project phase will see a re-write of our standard dispatch warehousing system (SDA) that typically runs on hand-held scanning terminals such as the Motorola Symbol MC9090 range. Some key deliverables of the SDA standardisation project will include:

  1. Swapping out Windows CE database running on handhelds for SQL Lite eliminating the requirement to install IIS on local servers and to sync via IIS services. SQL lite is also a higher performing database than SQL CE.
  2. Customising the SDA application to work with Emydex-on-demand i.e., delivery via the cloud, licencing and subscription services for value-added/overseas resellers
  3. Reworking of SDA application to work more seamlessly with higher resolution screen-sizes eg., MC9190
  4. Creating a version of the new CCL to work with the compact framework
  5. Standardisation of SDA forms such as:
  • QC Release
  • Into Production
  • Return From Production
  • To Rework
  • Palletizing
  • Movements
  • Stock Reconciliation/Cycle
  • Order Picking
  • Shipments
  • Customer Returns

The Emydex Standard Systems project takes the best of each of our systems and applies a common standard across the whole suite of products. Configuration will be provided; that will allow each customer to configure their system to meet their own needs without the need for Business Logic or custom code written by Emydex. While configuration is not as extensible as customisation, we feel it will provide ample personalisation for smaller food processors who do not have m/any internal IT staff.

Emydex On-Demand

Emydex on Demand is an iteration of Emydex delivered via and powered by the cloud (Microsoft Windows Azure). Emydex on Demand will enable Emydex to deploy systems to our customers in a fraction of the time, to maintain and upgrade systems quicker and easier, and allow customers more freedom than any comparable system on the market in terms of installation availability.

Many distributors working within our specialised food processing industries, both here and overseas, have expressed a desire to have the ability to install and manage Emydex systems for their customers. Traditionally the level of customisation desired by customers meant that only Emydex and it’s team could reasonably manage a customers requests. With Emydex on Demand and its configuration model, we will be able to provide a partner system with industry champions who wish to offer Emydex as a solution to their customers. Both Emydex and it’s partners will be able to support customers ranging from small all the way to enterprise level and provide standardised solutions with custom configuration on a per customer basis.

Direct Label printing

Traditionally label printing has presented a bottleneck for fast paced production. Because of the complexity of label design and templating, printing is usually provided via Windows Spooler or via supporting functionality from a given Label Designer company, both of which are slow. Our innovation team has designed a new direct label printing engine that allows customers to design labels in a third party label designer (we currently support NiceLabel) and import them into their Emydex system. By importing the label in to Emydex we can then optimise and print the label directly over TCP or Serial resulting in noticeably quicker print times. The direct label printing engine will be available for our Client, PCA, and MDA for all customers. Emydex will continue to support and maintain Nice Labels in tandem which will better suit our customers that require more WISIWIG type functionality, but for those in the need of high-speed label printing (such as retail production lines) the DLP engine will be the better option.

Common Core Libraries

At Emydex we have an extensive collection of internal tooling and support libraries which enable us to build great software. The Common Core Libraries or CCL for short is a reworking of these libraries and tools that includes automated testing, improved documentation and modernisation. While the CCL is an internal project for the most part, the improvements it brings will be noticeable from a customer’s perspective. Some of the deliverables of interest to our customers include:

  • A completely new and powerful logging system which will provide testers and support with detailed and relevant information for the purposes of troubleshooting or diagnostics. With this new system we are able to identify slowdowns and bottlenecks in our software down to 1/3rd of a millisecond.
  • A modern and robust threading model. Threading is complicated but it allows software to be much more responsive by allowing tasks to run in the background without impacting the front end. We have built a new threading model that is much easier to implement and manage from a developers perspective. This will allow our developers to run more work as background tasks, which in turn will improve the responsiveness of our system.
  • We now use the CCL as a test bed for a specific type of testing (Unit testing). Unit tests are extremely small, automated tests. These tests break code down into logical units and test if the unit behaves as expected. What makes unit tests so useful is the fact that thousands of tests can be ran at the click of a button with no interaction from a developer.

Emydex Standard Systems, Emydex-on-Demand, Direct Label Printing and other products and enhancements like CCL represent Emydex’s continuing drive to evolve to meet the needs of customers now and in the future.

By investing heavily in our existing products and innovating based on customers’ needs we feel we are in the best position possible to provide systems that work to optimise and support your business.

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Oliver Carty improves financial management with Simply Dynamics

Oliver Carty Brand
Simply Dynamics improves financial management for Ireland’s largest bacon producer

  • ERP solution from Simply Dynamics enabling 50% time reduction to run financial reports for Oliver Carty
  • 40% reduction in time to complete cheque run process for finance department
  • Robust EDI inbound and outbound message management

Dublin, 26th February 2013 – Simply Dynamics, a leading provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, today announced that it has implemented an ERP solution for Irish pork, bacon and rasher producer Oliver Carty. The new solution is supporting the company’s on-going expansion and providing them with greater visibility and management of key financial functions.

The Simply Dynamics engagement with Oliver Carty has a contract to the value of €80,000.

After a site visit and analysis of their existing systems, Emydex proposed to implement their replacement Production Management system in two initial project phases.

Oliver Carty is a family run Irish business located in Athlone and is one of Ireland’s largest producers of bacon. It currently has 140 employees which increases substantially at different times of the year to meet seasonal demand and has a turnover of €45 million. Oliver Carty supplies a range of branded and own brand pork, bacon and rasher products to Ireland’s key retailers.

Oliver Carty operated an amalgamation of four different software systems, namely financial, intake, production, and dispatch. The interaction between the four systems was minimal, causing serious delays with the availability of real-time information and reporting bottlenecks.

After a full analysis of the existing software, Oliver Carty decided to replace their entire system with two fully integrated software solutions that could manage all of the financial and factory floor production processes from door-to-door.

Simply Dynamics was chosen for its Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP solution. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is providing the finance department with immediate access to information such as order history, credit management, order status, and claims processing.

Oliver Carty has achieved some significant benefits as a result of the new solution including a 50% reduction in the time taken to run financial reports and a 40% reduction in the time to complete the cheque run process.

The Microsoft Dynamics Nav system delivered by Simply Dynamics integrates fully with Oliver Carty’s production management software, which was provided by Emydex Technology. The combination of the Simply Dynamics and Emydex systems enables communication and synchronisation of both master and transactional data from all departments within the organisation to Microsoft Dynamics Nav. This fully integrated solution can now be applied to any future Emydex and Simply Dynamics implementations.

Nicole Verdon, financial controller, Oliver Carty said, “The integration between Simply Dynamics and Emydex provides us with instant visibility and traceability across the entire organisation. The Simply Dynamics solution has also streamlined all our processes and we now have real-time access to our key performance indicators such as yield, pricing and invoicing data for the company.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is also enabling Oliver Carty to manage multiple sales order processes including Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which is essential in the food distribution industry for communication with its retail customers. It also has the ability to account for catch weights, enabling Oliver Carty to manage products priced by weight but whose weight varies.

Ted Carty, managing director, Oliver Carty commented, “We operate in a market where the price of raw materials are constantly changing so we need to have the most accurate information at any given time. Simply Dynamics has provided us with highly integrated, real-time information at our fingertips, enabling us to make fast and smart business decisions.”

Willie Fitzgerald, Sales Manager, Simply Dynamics said, “Microsoft Dynamics NAV has given Oliver Carty the ability to simplify access to business critical financial information and enhance its control and visibility over an expanding business. As the company continues to grow Microsoft Dynamics NAV has the flexibility to change and grow with them and meet the unique needs of a company operating in the food distribution industry.”

David McMahon, CEO, Emydex said “the Emydex factory floor data capture and production reporting system is designed to be ‘open’ such that it can interface to, and exchange data with any 3rd party ERP or financial system, as well as any 3rd party Cold Store or Supplier systems. The fact we have now collaborated closely with Simply Dynamics to build a bridge to Microsoft’s NAV ERP system is a win-win for all parties but especially our customers. “Build once, use many times” means the integration points between Emydex and NAV come practically out-of-the-box reducing installation and testing time and hence cost.”

Oliver Carty plans to extend its Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution to incorporate other areas of the business such as inventory and warehousing over the coming months.

Source article: Simply Dynamics – Oliver Carty news article
For more information on the Emydex system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Emydex rollout across Dawn Meats Group

Dawn Meats Brand
An Emydex customer since 2007, the Dawn Meats Group is one of the largest suppliers of Irish and British Beef, Pork and Lamb in Europe.

Last year (2012) was a milestone year for the group as it secured a 5 year €300m contract for McDonalds, in addition to building a new state of the art patty plant at Carroll’s Cross, Co Waterford, as well as acquiring West Devon Meats in South West England. This follows the group’s acquisition of the Duerden beef abattoir in the Lake District, and the upgrade of their beef slaughter and processing plant in Cardington, UK in 2011.

Dawn Meats began rolling out Emydex’s Production Management software system across the group during 2008. Four years later, Emydex continues to operate as the group standard factory floor data capture and production and traceability reporting system in 11 of the 13 plants within the group including Dawn Meats France.

From Carcass intake, through boning, further processing, packing, box stock and dispatch, Emydex captures and reports on production data, enabling Dawn Meats to analyse and manage their stocks, yields and dispatches, whilst maintaining full food chain traceability.

Commenting on the Emydex system roll-out Shane Slattery, Group IT Manager with Dawn Meats said “Emydex is a central pillar of our strategic IT plan going forward, and our goal now is to concentrate on completing the roll-out of Emydex to our primary processing sites by year end. This plan may seem aggressive, but we believe that it is achievable on account of the inherent flexibility of the core Emydex product to handle any differences in the business processes required in our disparate sites”.

Plans are to complete the Emydex roll-out across the group in 2013, with the implementation of the system at Dawn’s Lamb processing plant in Ballyhaunis in Ireland, as well as the roll-out of Emydex’s kill line & payments systems to all of Dawn’s slaughter plants within the group.

For more information on the Emydex kill line system contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Future Trends

What are meat processors and retailers currently looking for from IT systems? What is driving that demand (e.g. legislation, environmental and/or other)? What are the general trends? Future trends?

In our experience meat processors are generally looking for five things when deciding to implement new software systems.

  • Full integration between Financial and production systems
  • Dynamic Yield reports that highlight areas where improvements can be made
  • Dynamic reporting of the status of production against plan
  • Accurate reporting of stock, with age analysis and availability
  • Fast, accurate order picking and containerising, ensuring documentation does not hold up deliveries.

The drivers are usually one or a combination of requirements to drive efficiencies, legislative demands, customer demand and ultimately profitability.

Future trends are definitely towards more automation in processing. Emydex are actively involved in shop floor automation projects specifically designed to improve yield, throughput and efficiency.

Minimizing operator involvement is also high on a list of customer priorities, Emydex systems are being used to plan production in the office and then issue those plans to the shop floor to control production using RFID tracking and shop floor automation, with the minimum of operator involvement.

A key benefit that results from implementation of all of the above functionality is traceability that is second to none. Emydex systems record the full history of everything that has happened to a product, whether it is a forward trace, backward trace or mass-balance traceability report. Furthermore, for re-usable containers such as refrigerated containers, crates, dolav’s (pallet boxes), hooks and gambrels, Emydex can even trace the history of every product that has ever been in that container.

Emydex on Demand

The Emydex team have been quietly developing a solution which we expect to have a major impact on small to medium size processors who do not have their own in house IT departments.

Emydex on Demand utilises the power and availability of the internet for the deployment of new standard solutions being developed. Emydex on Demand is a hybrid solution, not running fully as “Software as a Service” (i.e. Hosted in the cloud);

Emydex recognise that processors still need to be able to label boxes even if the network connection is down. As such the new standard Emydex application programs for data collection will run on the data collection terminal itself, not on the internet, the terminals will also have their own off line database allowing operation to continue even if internet connection is not available.

The Emydex database however will be hosted on the Microsoft Azure “cloud platform” this platform is constantly being updated by Microsoft in terms of both hardware and software. Back up is also inbuilt into the Azure package. From a support point of view, Emydex technicians are dealing with one standard database. Software deployment of both shop floor and office applications is achieved simply by selecting a hyperlink which automatically downloads and installs the application programs.

Emydex Apps!

Not quite the same as those thousands of little programs that can be down loaded to your smart phone or tablet but following the same idea. Emydex will be launching a sequence of standard shop floor applications for collecting data, printing labels and reports for commonly used applications in the food industry.

Each application will have a shop floor component and a corresponding back office component. Both components will connect to the Emydex on Demand database running in the cloud. Developed using the combined 130 years of food industry experience inherent in the Emydex design team, the standard apps will have a degree of built in configurability enabling them to meet the majority of users requirements.

Initial apps being developed are:

  • Outer Case Marking Station
  • Individual Pack Labelling Station
  • Recipe Formulation Station
  • Intake Station
  • Dispatch Station
  • Into/Out of Process Station

If a user invests in more than one application they will share the same database, enabling Emydex standard client applications for reporting on Process, Yields and Stocks.

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Emydex Livestock Payment System

All three flavours of the Emydex multi-species livestock payments system are now live and running in abattoirs spread across Ireland and the UK.

Emydex’s Beef payments system is live in Liffey Meat’s plant in Ballinasloe, as well as Euro Farm Foods in Ireland. The Lamb payments system is live in Scotlamb (Vivers) in Scotland and the Emydex Pig payments system in Dawn Pork and Bacon in Ireland. Since being installed at these plants the system is being considered by a number of plants in the UK and Ireland, and even further afield in mainland Europe and Africa via our re-seller network.

Integration with other Emydex Kill Line Components

The payments system integrates with Emydex’s livestock booking component in order to ensure that any special prices applied at the time of booking are used for the payments. If no special prices are used then the system defaults to a base price per species/category.

When integrated to the payments system the booking component is able to retrieve the previous historical prices paid to a producer and the previous quality of animals received. This is for assistance when special prices need to be negotiated.

Whilst the main kill data is read from the Emydex carcass classification component, the payment system is in effect a stand-alone module, and whilst integration with other Emydex kill line components offers advantages, they are not compulsory. The Emydex payments system is capable of integration with any supplier’s kill line systems.

Settlement Schemes

The payment system itself is highly configurable. The method of calculating the amount to be paid for each carcass is called a ‘settlement schedule’. Whilst it would be simplest to administer if there was a single settlement schedule for all producers, this is often not possible. The system therefore allows any number of settlement schemes to be created and allocated against producers/agents.

Each settlement scheme can be made up of any number of elements. All schemes will start with a default base price/kg for each category of livestock being killed. In its simplest form this price is used to calculate the initial value of the carcass. Base prices can be over-written with prices agreed at time of booking, and/or at time of payment.

There are then a set of adjustment tables that are applied sequentially to the carcass to arrive at the final purchase price. Whilst these adjustments are normally always deductions, the Emydex system will allow bonuses to be paid for specific conditions.

Typical Adjustment tables would be:

Weight range table – with flat rate value paid above specific weights
Eurograde table – with adjustments based upon a grid of confirmation and fat class
Fault table – with adjustments based upon specific fault conditions
Quality table – with adjustments based upon the producers quality status

The Emydex system enables the user to set up as many adjustment tables as required using any parameter either captured in the system or recalled from the database.

The system has now calculated the individual value of each animal and the gross value of the lot. There are now a set of deductions that need to be applied to the gross value.

Again these deductions are created by the user. A specific set of deductions is defined for each settlement scheme.

Typical deductions (which can be specified as per kg or per head) include Haulage, Industry Levies, Veterinary Levies and Clipping Charges.

Pricing Screen:

Emydex Payments screen

Report Printing

Dependent upon the species/producer, there may be a requirement for the remittance advice note to show individual animals or grouped animals (e.g. by weight range or grade range). The system can be set to print either or both.

If the user requires it, the remittance advice note and cheque can be incorporated into the same document.

Reports are also available for any deductions specified.

Financial Integration

The Emydex payment system has the functionality to be operated in two modes.

Financial System Prints Cheques

In the first mode Emydex simply prints remittance advice notes and a list of all individual lot payments. This list is also available as a file for export into the user’s financial system for invoicing.

In the case of deductions, an invoice is normally received from the service provider, the Emydex deductions reports can be used to cross check the invoice amounts.

Emydex Prints Cheques

In this scenario the cheque is printed by the Emydex system (either attached to remittance advice note or on separate stationary). The Emydex system will also then print invoice lists with cheque numbers. This list is also available as a file for export into the user’s financial system.

Summary

The Emydex Livestock Payments System eliminates calculation errors by integrating the payment calculation system with the livestock classification system. It is a real time system that enables the payment calculation to be made as soon as a lot has been processed, significantly improving the efficiency of the payments office.

Historical data analysis enables processors detailed views of producer’s deliveries to the plant, such information can be shared with producers to the benefit of both parties.

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