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Four New Senior Programmers join the Emydex Development team

In line with continued growth and expansion, mainly in overseas markets, Emydex is pleased to announce four new senior hires joining the Emydex Development and Implementation teams over the past 9 months

Returning home to Ireland after a number of years living and working in Melbourne, Australia,Dermot O’Sullivan joins Emydex as a Senior Developer. Dermot holds a BSC Degree in Business Information Systems from Dublin Institute of Technology. He has over 14 years programming experience, including 8 years .Net development with companies such as RXP and Cognology in Australia.

Emydex Corporate Offices

Pat Doocey, also joins the Emydex Implementation team as a Senior Developer with over 18 years work experience in such companies as MX Sweep, the LGCSB and HP where he worked as a Process Engineer. Pat holds a BEng (Hons) in Manufacturing Engineering from Coventry University. He is a keen cyclist, having recently made history by participating in the first Irish team to complete the ‘Race Across America’ non-stop cycling race, with only eight riders and no crew.

Another recent joiner to the Emydex development team, also with an Australian connection, isScott Doeke, originally from Southern Australia, now living in Ireland for over 10 years. Scott joins Emydex with over 20 years programming experience, and holds a BEng in Electronic Engineering from the University of South Australia. Previous to Emydex Scott worked as a software developer for Domogo, a company he co-founded. Scott is keen on both cricket & badminton.

Emydex Corporate Offices
Emydex Corporate Offices
Emydex Corporate Offices

Finally our most recent new hire is Pawel Gonet, a software engineer for the past 15 years, mostly working with Microsoft technologies C#.Net and SQL. Pawel holds a B.SC Software Engineering Degree from the Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland. Prior to joining Emydex, Pawel worked for 8 years with Gamma & Bizmaps in Dublin.

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Emydex move to new Corporate Office in Dublin. Plans for Australian office

Emydex today are pleased to announce the relocation of their Dublin headquarters to a new corporate office in Unit 4B-5, Blanchardstown Corporate Park, Dublin 15.

Emydex’s Product Development, Implementation and Support teams were previously split over three floors across two separate buildings. The move to unit 4B-5 into a single large open-plan space means everyone is now working closely together, with plenty of room for the company to grow from the current team of thirty people to forty five or fifty as required.

Emydex at MeatUp Uk 2011
Emydex at MeatUp Uk 2011
Emydex at MeatUp Uk 2011
“I see our future growth being overseas rather than Ireland at this point” said Emydex CEO David McMahon. “Right now our business is mostly focussed on food processing markets in the UK, Southern Africa, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Whilst we can service both UK and Southern Africa effectively from Dublin given we’re all working in the same time zones, we’re looking to open an office in Australia by the end of the year. We’ve been working with a distributor based in Brisbane for the past two years. Our plan to incorporate a new company in Australia and build a team there to service meat, fish and food processors based in Australia and New Zealand.
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Emydex sign many of Ireland’s Largest Fish Processors

Exhibiting at the Teagasc Meat@Gateways event being held in Ashtown, Emydex today announce they have signed up several new Fish processing customers in as many months.

Working in conjunction with BIM’s eLocate scheme, designed to encourage seafood enterprises to implement common standards of traceability, labelling and weighing through the implementation of Traceability software systems such as Emydex.

Emydex Fish News

Pictured with Tom Hayes TD, Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine at the Teagasc – Food Innovation Gateway event are Emydex CEO, David McMahon and Emydex Product Director, James Grennan.

Emydex has so far signed up some of the largest processors in Ireland including Castletownbere Fisherman’s co-op, Glenmar Shellfish,  Goodfish and Eiranova, all located in Co. Cork, the Clogherhead Fisherman’s co-op in Louth, Galway & Aran Fishermans co-operative, Nolans Seafood and Rockabill in Co.Dublin.

Roll-out is well underway in most projects, with the Emydex Production Management System now operational in many seafood processing factories. The Emydex Fish factory system was designed in close collaboration with the GS1 Ireland and BIM, the latter whose aim is to implement barcode labelling and traceability standards across the seafood processing Industries in Ireland, as well as Europe. In addition, Emydex’s labelling at sea system is currently being trialed a number of Trawlers operating in the Irish Sea.

Emydex’s Fish Processing software system is designed to handle all types of seafood processing whether white fish or shellfish, fresh or frozen, and can manage the entire seafood processing supply chain from boats labelling product at sea, to boat landings, 3rd party intake, re-grading, production and processing such as filleting, smoking, labelling, warehousing and dispatch. The system also provides for real-time yield analysis and KPI reporting

The software system can integrate to 3rd party cold stores, financial systems as well as a large range of factory floor hardware devices such as indicator/scales, PC terminals and hand-held scanning devices used for sales order picking and dispatch as well as stock management.

teagasc-logo

More info on the Meat@gateways event can be found here

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Appointment of Australasian Distributor

Emydex are pleased to announce the appointment of Ian Carson and his team as the Emydex partner distributor for the region. Based in Brisbane Australia, Ian previously worked with Emydex on a number of customer implementations in both Ireland and Southern Africa where he became familiar with the underlying structure and workings of the data capture and production reporting platform.

Ian believes the Emydex solution has great potential for the Australian and New Zealand markets. Being a mature yet modern, highly flexible solution, already proven in many large multinational meat processing companies, Emydex is ideally suited to food & meat processors both large and small. By utilising existing hardware, customers can significantly reduce the cost of upgrading to a new system and yet gain all the benefits offered by a modern, flexible and robust software environment.

Ian has worked for many years in senior positions with Sastek and latterly the Cedar Creek Company and has a wealth of experience in the food processing industry with the likes of Unilever, Heinz and Lowe Walker. With over 25 years in the meat processing industry in both Australasia and overseas, not only as an ‘end user’ but also as a systems provider, Ian has a deep understanding of both business processes and importantly,how technology can add value to these.

Having worked with many systems in the past,Ian quickly noted a particular strength of the Emydex system is its ability to offer a ‘business logic’ layer which allows Emydex to tailor the software platform to meet customer-specific needs, and yet still keep the core base system intact allowing for upgrades as they become available. This allows companies to maintain the competitive advantage they derive from their unique business processes, yet still take advantage of the new features included in future software upgrades, something most other systems do not allow.

In addition to traditional ‘on-premise’ installations, the Emydex system can also be offered as a service (SaaS), hosted as a cloud based system with flexible licensing models allowing for reductions in the capital costs of upgrading systems, as well as keeping ongoing costs of ownership to reasonable levels. Cloud based deployment can also assist larger multi-site companies to manage their own Emydex software environment centrally, thereby reducing administration costs.

Realising that support for a system is as important as the functionality itself, Ian is delighted that his Australian based team offering 1st and 2nd level support,backed by the Ireland-based technical help-desk team, will be able to offer 24-hour support for customers with support staff online and able to assist at anytime.

Ian Carson (far right) with some of the Emydex delivery team on assignment in Namibia.

Ian Carson (far right) with some of the Emydex delivery team on assignment in Namibia.

In order to obtain more information or for a product demonstration please contact Ian on:

Office: +61 7 3289 8336
Mobile: +61 4566 31662
Email: ian.carson@emydex.com

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Emydex at Foodex UK 2014

Emydex technology are exhibiting our software at the Foodex trade show which will take place at the NEC Birmingham from 24th – 26th March 2014.

The Emydex stand that we will share with a UK hardware partner MWS Ltd of Leicesterwill be located in the UKWA Pavilion in Hall 20, at stand J369 where David McMahon, Emydex CEO, James Grennan, Emydex CTO and Peter Kettell, Emydex UK Sales Manager will be on hand to demonstrate some of Emydex’s software modules and answer any questions you may have.

The exhibition will showcase the Emydex Recipe weighing module running on a RADWAG PUE5.15. PC terminal / weight indicator for whom MWS are UK agents. The recipe module will be configured for burger production.

Also on the stand will be Emydex’s latest OCM packing station software. Again running on a RADWAG PUE5.15.

Demonstrations and presentations will be available on other Emydex Meat Industry software modules.

MWS will be showing a selection of their high quality stainless steel weighing equipment, equipment stands and printer cabinets

Recipe System

Applicable to meat processors with added-value operations, the recipe module will step-by-step, instruct food operators as to the ingredients, weights and cooking instructions required to create finished goods. The system will also verify actual weights measured in real-time to ensure the correct weights have been applied, and allows for full traceability of all constituent parts of the finished product.

Foodex

Emydex software in use on Meat Factory floor terminalsEmydex software in use on Meat Factory floor terminals
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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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