The Dunbia Group, headquartered in Dungannon, Northern Ireland, recently completed installation of an entire Emydex iWAMS solution at their Retail plant in Preston, England. Dunbia (Preston) is a modern processing facility comprising a beef and lamb abattoir and de-boning facility, and a separate retail packing operation.<\/p>\n
The facility has the capacity to process up to 1,500 cattle, 10,000 lambs and 600 tonnes of retail packed product per week. Dunbia originally installed the iWAMS Warehouse Management System module in their Preston plant two and a half years ago in September 2007.<\/p>\n
This recent upgrade project covered the entire facility end-to-end from stock intake, to production, packing, yields & costings, warehousing and dispatch, and incorporated Sales Order and Purchase order processing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis latest project took just eight weeks to complete from start to finish\u201d, said Jay Adams, IT Service Delivery Manager in Dunbia (Preston).<\/p>\n
\u201cThe project ran relatively smoothly when you consider the facility never had a transactional system running before, meaning we had to train all our staff over the two months before the system went live. Emydex also provided two weeks on-site support post go-live, which was a great reassurance in case anything went wrong, which it didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of benefits, the system gave Dunbia (Preston) immediate control over systems and reporting. Using the Emydex Data Management System, back office staff had instantaneous access to far more accurate reporting of efficiencies, yields and giveaways and operator performance\u201d Said Adams.<\/p>\n
The Emydex software system roll-out coincided with a parallel roll-out of new plant hardware including Marel Terminals, and Avery Scales. This included integration to high-value processing lines incorporating fully automated weighing and box level labelling.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmydex\u2019s \u2018open architecture\u2019 means it can integrate with any third party hardware, and as all the integration protocols had been written before, integrating was a breeze. Hardware independence is one of Emydex\u2019s key selling points\u201d, said Adams. \u201cWe\u2019re not tied down to a narrow choice of hardware; we can pick and choose the hardware configuration that best suits our requirements\u201d.<\/p>\n
Another key selling point with Emydex is the flexibility offered within the software itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe rolled out the standard flavour of the iWAMS Retail Solution initially, but over time we have made changes to the system in order to suit the specific ways we work in Dunbia (Preston), and the individual demands of our customers. Its fine to talk about \u201cgroup standards\u201d, but at the end of the day every facility will have differing requirements whether it\u2019s down to the physical layout of the plant that doesn\u2019t facilitate a \u2018standard\u2019 transaction flow, or down to the individual reporting requirements of a MD. So too, every customer or supermarket chain will have different requirements, so your systems have to have the ability to adapt to deliver these changes easily and quickly. That\u2019s what we have now with Emydex.\u201d<\/p>\n