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Dawn’s Highland Meats plant in Scotland goes live

Dawn Meats Brand
Following the successful roll-out of the Emydex software platform to Dawn Meat’s processing plants in Grannagh, Rathdowney and Charleville In Ireland, Emydex went live in Dawn’s Highland Meats plant in Scotland last week. Highland Meats are a major supplier of prime Scottish beef to the marketplace and operate a state-of-the-art abattoir and deboning facility purpose built in 1995.

Commenting on the launch Martin Curran, Group Factory Systems Manager with Dawn Meats said “it’s a credit to the joint Emydex/Dawn team that we are now in a position where with adequate planning, Emydex module roll-outs out can be completed within a short space of time without any interruption to production. As Emydex is hardware independent we were able to use existing indicators and printers thus saving on cost. New touchscreen PC’s of our choice were installed to run the Emydex Factory Floor applications

James Grennan, Emydex CTO. “The software roll-out took place in tandem with a complete re-vamp of hardware.” This first phase of the Highlands implementation focussed on the roll-out of the Emydex Carcass Management module with full integration to Highland’s existing Kill line system. Emydex Carcass management includes carcass modelling which allows for multiple splitting and de-boning scenarios, full stock management, carcass rebuilding, traceability, and carcass pricing.

Shane Slattery, IT Director with Dawn Meats Group said “Emydex is a central pillar of our strategic I.T. 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 see 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”.
For more information on the Emydex kill line system click here or contact Emydex on +353 1 8855990

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Kepak Beef Kill-line goes live

Kepak

Kepak Group went live with Emydex Technology’s Beef Kill Line software system at their Beef processing plant in Clonee this morning. After successfully running the Emydex kill line module in a test environment in Clonee for two weeks, the system was switched on and tested in ‘live’ mode over the weekend ready for Monday morning Beef processing.

“The Kepak and Emydex team worked very hard over the weekend to ensure everything went smoothly. Despite one or two small glitches, everything has gone exceptionally well this morning. Proof that a proper approach to testing does work” said Robbie Grogan, Finance Director, Kepak Group.

Beginning with Lairage, Kepak can now book animals onto the Emydex system, creating animal ‘lots’ with real time linkages to both the Irish Department of Agriculture’s AIM system (Animal Identification and Movement), as well as the Beef Quality Assurance system.

From Lairage the Animals then enter Kepak’s Line Sequencer where carcass numbers are issued, and brain sampling data is captured. The system then links to the Grading station where animal weight and grading information is collected.

“One of the best features of the Emydex kill line system, is that we now have automatic destination codes. We didn’t have that option before” said Tom Mulligan, Group Business Systems Manager with Kepak.

James Grennan, Technical Director with Emydex Technology said “ the kill line going live completes the full picture, as the Emydex platform now supports Kepak’s beef processing truly from end-to-end. From the reception of animals in Lairage, through to Carcass management, In-boning, Warehousing and Dispatch. The work doesn’t stop here however, as we next move on to roll-out our Lamb kill line system for Kepak’s lamb processing factory in Athleague”.

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Getting an upside out of a downturn

Silicon Republic

The recession marks an important era for business incubation. It allows start-ups that may otherwise have given up the scope to work on ideas that could drive much-needed efficiencies in Irish industry.

A high proportion of the companies that emerge from business incubation centres around the country are technology-based, and the economic downturn presents both opportunities and problems for such firms.

Some have found their market simply doesn’t exist anymore because corporate customers are cutting back wholesale on technology investment, or a particular industry has changed radically – financial services being the most obvious example.

However, bad economic times can be advantageous for certain technology firms. As Ken Germaine, chief executive of the BASE Enterprise Centre in Dublin 15, points out, as large companies try to downsize in terms of staff, they will place more emphasis on technology to drive efficiencies.

“During a recession, many companies slow down, many survive and a small number make a hell of a lot of money,” he says. “This period is important for incubation because a lot of people leaving companies have business ideas they want to subcontract into those companies or into the open market.

“If you put 100 people into incubation, you can expect 20 or 30 to come out at the other end [generally after three years] successfully, and two or three of those to potentially be an Apple or an Iona Technologies.”

One company that successfully left the BASE centre this year following three years’ incubation is Emydex. The company’s iWAMS system is a one-stop traceability solution for the food-processing industry. Not only has the recession had no ill-effects on the firm’s business so  far, but the pork-ban crisis also helped the company as it raised awareness for the need for traceability solutions, says technical director James Grennan.

He and his partner in the business, Redmond Burke, had both worked in the food-processing sector for many years, which gave them a deep understanding of what customers needed. “Most solutions available were hardware-based, such as weighing equipment, and we recognised the demand for software solutions that would offer traceability with added value,” he says.

iWAMS is designed to work with industrial touchscreen PCs, Wi-Fi networks, any terminal printer with Windows drivers and many other industrial data-capture hardware such as weighing scales, Bluetooth scanners, radio frequency identification (RFID) and so on. The idea is the system takes information from various points in the factory, connects it together and then sends it back to users in a simple front-end, allowing them to predict the best way to process or produce the product.

“When we came to the incubation centre, we started with a blank sheet of paper and didn’t know how receptive the market would be to us. We built prototypes and our first breakthrough came when we showed these at a small stand at the Fingal Enterprise Board food show in the RDS,” says Grennan.

“In terms of technology, we are looking at ways to get RFID working cost-effectively, as well as how our solution could be applied to different markets such as logistics and warehousing in other industries. In the long term, we want to get into franchising and licensing the technology.”

The concept of business incubation first caught on in Ireland in the Eighties, and there are now 20 campus-based innovation centres and 105 community enterprise centres offering incubation facilities, which range from space to support services such as mentoring.

“Ever since the Whitaker report in the Fifties, one of the main objectives of bringing in foreign direct investment to this country was to give people access to high-quality skills and then spin this off into indigenous industry,” says Germaine.

“This has happened, but I don’t think we in Ireland have been as good as we could have been in getting the message across that a lot of high-tech and low-tech businesses that went through incubation have been successful.”

By Sorcha Corcoran

Creating real market solutions for the meat industry.

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