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Emydex New Product Development Survey

Customer Survey Results

In March 2018, Emydex conducted a customer survey looking for feedback on New Product Development from key Emydex users within our existing customer community.

The survey queried customer interest levels in ten potential new products Emydex will potentially develop, to gauge interest in the products themselves and willingness to be part of the product design, validation and testing processes including:

  • Emydex Quality Management System (EQMS) – complete and live with customers
  • Emydex Product Specification System
  • Emydex Group-Wide Animal Payments System
  • Emydex Production Planning System – under development
  • Emydex Enterprise Master Data Management
  • Emydex Demand Planning & Forecasting System
  • Emydex Leaker Tracker System
  • Emydex Centralised Consolidated Reporting System
  • Business Intelligence & Data Analytics using MS Power BI

The survey results are highlighted below, summarising the products customers are most interested in seeing us develop in the future:

1st place

EQMS system with 97% of customers who responded either (1) very interested/willing to assist with design and testing or (2) interested, please keep me updated.

Emydex have developed a centralised QMS solution providing for all quality & compliance needs in one place, suitable for single or multi-site operations.

Joint 2nd place

Product Specification Management system and Business Intelligence with 93% of customers either very interested/willing to assist with design and testing or (2) interested, keep me updated.

Business Intelligence also had the highest single score for Very Interested/ willing to assist, with just over half of all survey respondents willing to participate in the design and testing.

Product Specification Management system – A centralised data storage solution for product specifications, such as raw materials, ingredients, packaging and finished goods, alerting internal and external partners of changes to the product spec.

Business Intelligence - Host & utilize the power of Power BI, that allows the creation of user-definable dashboards, pulling data from many sources and performing data analytics, accessing data via web based and mobile devices.

4th place

Production Planning with 90% of all customer respondents either very interested or interested, keep me updated.

Generate Production Plans based on sales demands & stock levels, using multi-tiered Bill-of-Materials. Calculate material & packaging requirements, with scheduling, capacity planning and cost calculations.

5th place

Master Data Management on 84%.

Setup & maintain all master data in one location, such as Products, Label Designs & Bill-of-Materials, with full auditing & version control and management over publishing of master data to the group’s individual plants.

Joint 6th place

Cloud Animal Payments and Centralised Reporting, with 83% either very interested or interested, keep me updated.

Cloud Animal Payments - Cloud-hosted Animal payments system for multiple production sites, with central booking system & multi-currency support.

Centralised Reporting - Bring all plant level data into one place in a consistent and consolidated state to allow group wide reporting and data archiving.

8th place

Demand Planning with 56% either very interested or interested, keep me updated.

Generate long term demand planning & forecasting for sales and material requirements, across multiple plants by looking at historical trends and strategic plans.

9th place 

Leaker Tracker System with 53% either very interested or interested, keep me updated.

A system that will give you the ability to record and report vacuum pack leakers in real time the way you want!
Capturing this data will allow you to find root causes of leaking vacuum-packed products, test and track new trail packing, save money on packaging waste and reduce claims from customers.

Apple iPad Winner

As part of the survey, we placed all customer respondents into a draw to win an Apple iPad. The winner (pictured below) was Paul Reid from Rosderra Irish Meats.

David McMahon, Emydex CEO (right) presenting Apple iPad to Paul Reid (left).

For more information on any of our products or if you would like to participate in any of the mentioned New Product Development projects please contact Shane Hayes in Emydex on:

+353 1 8855990 or email Shane on shane.hayes@emydex.com

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Emydex Traceability in Tuna Processor in Philippines

Meliomar Inc. is a tuna and seafood processing and export company based in Manila, Philippines. Meliomar focus on the development and trade of responsibly produced and high quality sustainable seafood, sourced from small-scale fisheries from areas throughout the Philippines.

Meliomar is a commercial partner of the Artsemar program for fisheries improvement run by Blueyou Consulting, based in Switzerland. By creating direct market access for seafood caught by smallholder fishers, the Artesmar initiative promotes the development of more sustainable business and fishing practices.

Meliomar traceability tagging

Blueyou leads and participates in Fishery Improvement Projects, one of which projects was to implement an Emydex electronic data capture production control system in the Meliomar operation to replace their existing manual system. They were also looking for a comprehensive real-time Traceability system to replace their manual paper-based system for traceability recording and reporting.

Door-to-door Factory Floor System

Emydex implemented their Intake, Packing & Processing, Order Management and Warehouse Management software modules to cover Meliomar’s factory floor processes, from factory door-to-door including Procurement, Reception, Manufacturing, Packing, Sales Order Picking and Dispatch. As part of the implementation Emydex also built a series interfaces to their back-office ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

As Meliomar source fish from a multitude of suppliers and fishermen, Tuna ID tags are recorded as the fish are purchased. Each ID tag has a unique number made up of a location code and a consecutive number. Data capture and quality data is recorded at intake using a fixed position weighing station. Four labels are printed for each fish at intake, one for each loin, to ensure traceability is fully maintained throughout processing, using 2D Barcodes.

Meliomar’s business processes required Emydex to be more flexible in their approach to the system design, including the requirement to pack directly to Sales Orders pulled from NAV, as opposed to packing to stock.

Another requirement was the need to perform both Intake and Dispatch in off-line mode, as well as online (via wi-fi and network), due to poor internet connection in one of their factories. Meliomar needed functionality that allowed the creation of Purchase Orders and printing pallet labels on-site, and then load the POs onto a hand-held scanner.

The scanner and labels are later brought to a separate frozen storage facility, where they label pallets, enter the number of boxes on that pallet, and scan the pallet against a PO. When they get back to the main site, the data is then synced, and the data can be viewed on the system.

Predictive Re-Ordering

A key feature of this project was predictive re-ordering, which is based on average usage of a selected frozen product based on previous usage levels. Additional functionality allows them to optionally set a multiplier for a given week, in the event that they think they will be using more than the predicted amount for any given week. They can also set lead times for each product and receive warnings indicating that they will need to make a purchase order to maintain sufficient stock, or forecast when they will be out of stock, ensuring they have full visibility over stock levels at all times.

Production and Traceability Reporting System

Meliomar now have a comprehensive Production control & Traceability reporting system operating on the factory floor from door to door. By migrating from a manual system to an electronic data capture production reporting system and implementing an Emydex traceability system, this allows Meliomar to reliably trace all tuna products direct from their origin.

Commenting on the project, Christian Schmidradner, Meliomar General Manager said “Trust in the system is fast growing and the teams see how much less work is involved in processes (before handwritten and Excel inputted numbers in the thousands in forms, tedious hand-written reports to cross check for accounting and traceability purposes) and they have started to appreciate the system. We are very happy with the new system and I want to thank the Emydex team for their dedication and intensive work on customising and implementing our system over the last year”.

David McMahon, Emydex CEO added “the Meliomar system build was an interesting project in that the project was led for the customer by the BlueYou Consulting team in Switzerland, with the end-user and factory operations based in Manila, Philippines. Full credit to the combined project management and technical delivery teams for the successful configuration and implementation of a tailored Emydex factory floor solution for Meliomar, including integration to 3rd party industrial equipment and back-office systems, without ever having to visit the Philippines”.

For enquiries contact sales@emydex.com or call Emydex on contact us

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HJ Nolan Salmon Filleting Yield Control System

HJ Nolan Ltd have been in business for 95 years, since 1912. The company sells premium seafood products worldwide, mainly smoked salmon, under the well-known ‘Nolans Seafoods’ brand. Today the company employs almost 300 people across its two Seafood processing facilities in Dublin, Ireland and Aberdeen in Scotland.

HJ Nolan approached Emydex Technology and SF Engineering in 2014, with a request to commission a new salmon filleting and trimming line from SF Engineering, integrated to an in-line real-time Yield and Efficiency reporting software system from Emydex Technology.

Sean Carolan, IT Manager with HJ Nolan’s in Dublin explains the background to the project, “before the Emydex and SF Engineering solution was implemented, all our salmon filleting was done manually. This resulted in us being unable to calculate our yields until the end of the working day, and this calculation was done with pen and paper. This process was time consuming and often lead to inaccuracies and mistakes. As our production started to ramp-up, we found it increasingly difficult to manage this process, and it became necessary to find a way to automate this process.”

Automated Yield Reporting

SF Engineering and Emydex set to work with Nolans to design and build the end-solution required. This exercise resulted in a SF Engineering salmon filleting & trimming conveyor line, complete with an In-feed holding bin, de-heading station, weigh hopper and a distribution conveyor that feeds the salmon to six salmon filleting operators working on the line. Each individual operator station consists of a buffer hopper, a holding hopper, a trimming table, an offal chute and a reset button.

SF Engineering Salmon Filleting and Trimming SystemSF Engineering Salmon Filleting and Trimming System

To operate the system, each salmon-filleter working on the conveyor line first presses their reset button. This triggers the holding hopper to retract, and a new salmon falls into the hopper from the buffer hopper. The filleter then removes the fish to complete their trimming tasks, and once completed, places the fillet back onto the magenta weighing conveyor. The conveyor records the weight of the fish, and then waits for a free space on the takeaway conveyor. Once free, the conveyor sends the fish off to the pin-bone machine. When the operator’s holding-bin is emptied, the operator presses the reset button, starting the whole process all over again.

Cloud-Hosted or On-Premise

During each operation cycle, Emydex’s Data Capture System (DCS), captures each individual filler’s production data, and calculates the batch yield in real-time. Sean Carolan explains “the Emydex software system allows us to capture accurate yield data; weight-on versus weight-off, as well as production throughput; time-on versus time-off, from each individual filleter in real-time. This information is stored in a central cloud-hosted Emydex database, that can be viewed by both operators on the line, as well as our production supervisors on an industrial monitor running Emydex in the factory.

Real-Time KPI Reporting

Displaying production data and KPIs as they are happening in real-time, tends to have a motivational effect on the filleters working on the line, and improves operator productivity. Emydex production reporting can also be accessed on client PCs in the back-office, as well as anywhere around the world via a smart-phone, given the system is hosted in the cloud”.

On-floor Production reporting monitor displays individual filleter yields and throughputs accurately in real-timeOn-floor Production reporting monitor displays individual filleter yields and throughputs accurately in real-time

Carolan Continues “The ability to export accurate information instantly from the Emydex system, has greatly improved the process by which the filleters are paid. Before the implementation of the Emydex system, the production supervisor would have had to manually calculate each filleters weights and rate of pay. This information can now be exported and sent directly to our accounts department. The individual yield of each filleter can now be much more closely monitored by their supervisor. This allows us to insure each filleter is maintaining a satisfactory yield throughout the day.”

Traceability Reporting

“In addition to Yield and efficiency reporting, Emydex is also recording and reporting on food chain traceability throughout the production process” outlines David McMahon, Emydex CEO. “traceability details recorded for each batch include the Emydex ITN (Internal Traceability number), Production run, Supplier, Harvest Number, Harvest Date, Product, Species and size. Same as for production reporting, traceability reporting is available instantly and accurately, from any device connected to the central database in the cloud. Optionally, the system can be hosting on-site/on-premises if required”.

Customer Support

Sean Carolan concludes “Emydex offered unwavering support to Nolans from the onset of this project. Throughout the initial design process, the implementation and the aftersales support, Emydex has maintained an unparalleled level of support and professionalism. It’s always a pleasure dealing with anyone from the Emydex team, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to anyone in the market for reliable, well-supported factory floor software solution.”

 

About Emydex Technology: Emydex Technology is a leading supplier of Traceability reporting and Production Management Software systems to Meat, Fish and Food Processors around the world. Over 100 food processing factories, operating across 4 continents, use Emydex factory floor software systems to monitor, control and report on their Production yields, stocks, traceability, food quality, safety and compliance.

About SF Engineering: SF Engineering is an award-winning Irish engineering company that designs and manufacturers food processing and packaging solutions for the food industry globally. The company’s Engineering solutions are operating in meat, fish and food processing companies throughout Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Chile

About Emydex & SF Engineering: Emydex Technology and SF Engineering have worked on a number of joint software/hardware integration projects for shared customers over the past number of years. In addition to the salmon filleting line solution delivered to HJ Nolans, other joint projects including Emydex integration to an SF Engineering pork primal grading line, as well as integration to RFID controlled SF Engineering conveyor systems operating in a lamb Processing plant in the UK.

For enquiries contact sales@emydex.com or call Emydex on contact us

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Traceability enabled in Ireland’s Largest Pig Processor

Rosderra Irish Meats Group is the largest pork processing company in Ireland. The group processes over 1.5 million pigs per annum across its two state-of-the-art processing facilities at Edenderry, Co. Offaly, and Roscrea, Co. Tipperary. In addition, Rosderra has a speciality Meat Ingredients facility in Clara, Co. Offaly, a Pork-Curing facility in Jamestown, Co. Leitrim, and a Cooked Meats facility in Stradone, Co. Cavan.

Rosderra approached Emydex in 2014 to replace their existing traceability and production control systems operating across the group approaching end-of-life. After winning a competitive tender, Emydex was awarded the contract to supply a new factory floor data capture IT solution that operates door-to-door across the group’s four main operating plants. All production processes were to be covered, including weighbridge integration, lairage, grading, primal deboning, further processing, packing, order picking and dispatch, stock, yield management and traceability reporting.

Split into eight distinct project phases, the project also included implementing Emydex’s Cold Store system into Rosderra’s Cold Store facility in Jamestown and tight integration with third-party warehouse management systems operating in external cold stores utilised by Rosderra’s production plants.

As part of the initial project phases, Emydex worked with Rosderra’s IT integration partner to build robust interfaces to the group’s SAP system. Integration points were built using AS2 and XML transfer files to allow Emydex to pull products, materials, and customer files from SAP, as well as Customer Sales orders destined for both Rosderra production sites and third-party cold stores, and later send updated Stock data back to SAP for stock valuation and available-to-promise purposes.

After completing the roll-out of Emydex’s Packing and Warehouse Management systems to Rosderra’s four operating plants in early 2016, the focus shifted to the Boning Hall operations in Edenderry and Roscrea. These project phases included implementing Emydex’s boning hall systems for cutting, boning, further processing, and Yield Control. Yield Reporting from Emydex includes Carcass chill loss, Cutting yield, chill loss/cutting summary and Boning Hall yield reports.

Presently, the project is in its final phase, which covers the Abattoir operations at both Edenderry and Roscrea, including a centralised slaughter plan and livestock appointments system, weigh-bridge integration, lairage bookings, bulk sequencing, and detained and pig grading stations. Reporting will include a real-time slaughter line monitor program that will accurately display the status of the slaughter with analysis by lot. Slaughter line analysis can be displayed in both tabular and graphical reporting formats.

Commenting on the project, David McMahon, Emydex CEO, said, “We are now well into the final stages of a two-year Emydex systems roll-out across the Rosderra group, covering door-to-door processes as well as integrations to back-office ERP, 3rd party cold stores and suppliers as well as factory floor machinery. Looking back over the two years, I see the project has run smoothly. Both the Emydex and Rosderra project teams worked well together to plan and deliver each project phase on schedule without any major disruption to operations. Rosderra is now reaping the benefits of having a robust factory floor data capture Production control system installed, with Emydex providing group and plant managers and supervisors with real-time and accurate reporting on their Production Yields, Stocks and Traceability.”

Louis Ennis, Rosderra Group Finance and Emydex project sponsor added, “Rosderra Irish Meats Group chose Emydex as an end-to-end solution to replace our legacy system. The installation, which is currently ongoing, will be completed over multiple phases across multiple sites, with all implementations running smoothly and with minimum disruption to the business. The first implementation was the warehouse and packing modules, and, through added interfaces with our ERP system, brought immediate benefit to the business through greater visibility on orders, improved data validation and reduced administration, especially around our cold store loads where manual input has been greatly reduced. Overall, the system greatly improved real-time information and offered ease of use and improved flexibility when making changes”

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Introducing Emydex EQMS – Electronic Quality Management System

The Emydex Electronic Quality Management System (EQMS) has undergone a major redesign and redevelopment over the past 12 months, with significant input from some of Emydex’s largest multi-plant beef, lamb, pork and seafood processors operating in Ireland, the UK, Africa and Australia.

Taking all the learnings and experiences gained from previous Emydex QC system implementations; this latest release of the Emydex QC module is a fully comprehensive and extensive QMS system, designed to cater for the needs of large Enterprise-level food processing organisations.

The system is ideally suited to group-level food processors operating different business divisions, spanning different geographies, offering both real-time and accurate reporting on QC activities, at both group and individual plant-level via the Emydex QC cloud-hosted platform.

Maintain a sky-level overview of QC activities across divisions and operations within the organisation, in real-time

Cloud v On-Premises: In addition to hosting in the cloud, the system can alternately be installed on-premises if required.

Small v Large: It can also cater just as effectively for both small and medium-sized meat, fish and food processing plants, as well as larger production operations.

EMYDEX QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DEMO VIDEO

Key features include:

BUILD

QC Workflow Builder: one of the most significant improvements to the Emydex QMS, is a major design and development effort focussed on developing an easy-to-use, yet comprehensive QC workflow builder tool.

This application allows in-house Technical and QC personnel (non-IT people) to design and build their own Quality workflows in-house, including QC surveys, QC check sheets and quality audits, without the need to involve either Emydex developers or internal IT resources.

The result is an easy-to-use, icon-driven workflow builder application, powered by Question Blocks that can be saved as templates, and re-used from one quality survey to the next.

Workflows can include conditional responses such as ‘if the answer is X do A, if Y then B’, and includes Action Plans such as notifying supervisors, generating follow-up actions, sending emails, reminders, notifications, triggering CAPA workflows etc.

Configure QC workflows from scratch. Determine what questions to ask, and how best to capture the information needed.

CAPTURE

QC Workflow Data Capture: once QC workflows have been designed and tested they can be executed on the factory floor. Workflow surveys can be validated by running them in ‘test mode’ in which case, the test transactions are saved separately from ‘live’ QC data.

QC data capture can be carried out using a range of data capture hardware devices including existing fixed-position Industrial terminals, rugged tough-books or even low-cost tablet devices running the Windows 10 operating system.


Capture QC data such as CAPA workflows on low-cost tablet devices running Windows 10


Capture QC data such as Product Quality Checks on rugged Toughbook devices for harsh environments

Emydex Production System Look-up & Validation – One major advantage of the Emydex QC module, is that food processors who have also implemented an Emydex Factory Floor Production Control and Traceability reporting system in their operations, can scan product barcodes, retrieve traceability details, and perform validation from the Emydex QC system against production data stored in their Emydex Production system, something not possible with independent 3rd party QC systems.


Kill line QC inspections – logging QC faults against Carcasses within Emydex Production systems

REPORT

Instant Back-office Reporting via Plant Maps & Dynamic Data Views – whether operating in a single plant or group plant operation, managers and supervisors will have real-time access to QC data captured as it happens.

The QC module plant map drill-downs allow supervisors to ‘manage by exception’ drilling down to the areas where any QC issues or non-conformances are raised, to investigate and raise actions as needed.


Drill-down plant maps enable issues & non-conformances to be identified and actioned quickly

QC Data can also be viewed using Data Grids and Views that can be configured by users themselves, and saved as personal templates; allowing data to be grouped, sorted, filtered, analysed and exported to Word, Excel or Email if needed.

 Customise the way you view results, and decide what information you want to see and when

Emydex Report Writer – Emydex’s QC report writing application can also be used to prepare printed reports that can match exactly the format of the original paper-based QC surveys and check-sheets if required.


Original Paper-based QC Survey

Same QC data presented in similar report format post electronic data capture on an Emydex QC device

Other features worth highlighting include:

Production Calendars

Create multiple production calendars. Outline schedules relative to hours of operation.

Production Schedules

Create Schedules to control what needs to be done and when? Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly schedules

(1) Pre-production (2) Post-production or (3) During production at set interval checks – you decide

Schedule Workflows

Schedule Workflows with a click of a button. Apply zero, one or many schedules to a workflow as required

Roles & Responsibilities

Assign QC Workflows only to those responsible for them. Assign Actions only to those with the authority to complete them.

Missed Workflow Notifications

Quality System will track missed Workflows. Automatically notify when a workflow is missing or not completed as scheduled.

Organisation

Assign QC Workflows to different Plants, Areas and Roles. Track what needs to be done where?

Equipment


Manage Equipment Lists. Create Preventative maintenance quality checks for equipment.

Actions Console

Log into your personal QC Actions console. Track all your Quality System Actions. See only Actions you are responsible for.

To organise an Online demonstration or request a 30-day free trial of the Emydex QMS System, please get in touch with Emydex on sales@emydex.com or call us via our contact numbers

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How the Food Industry should handle contamination

From salmonella in Maltesers to insecticide in eggs: how the food industry should handle contamination.

Businesses, regardless of size, should be responsible for their individual link in the food supply chain, so that product contamination can be recognised and dealt with effectively.

According to product liability barrister at a leading London law firm, scares such as the salmonella in Maltesers to eggs contaminated with insecticide are “nightmare scenarios” for the firms involved.

“As consumers, we have a right to assume that the things we buy on the shelves should be safe,” Alistair Mackenzie from Chambers 2 Temple Gardens said.

Food safety regulation is aimed at keeping consumers safe, he added, and to ensure there is no incentive for the industry to hide any issues that it discovers.

Often the law imposes penalties on a wide range of people involved in a contamination case, including those involved at any stage in the food arriving with the final consumer.

“In terms of keeping track of products, monitoring Maltesers products and eggs varies quite a bit, but the responsibility still remains,” said Mr Mackenzie.

“The key has got to be in meticulous record keeping. And making sure that the person you’re sending it on to is also keeping track.”

Mr Mackenzie held up the example of the scares with Mars and eggs as almost polar opposites in the way contamination cases should be handled.

“When Mars first recognised that there might be a salmonella problem, they put their hand up, as the law requires. This is a good example of what should be done; the affected products were clearly indicated and the contaminated was very heavily publicised,” he said.

Comparing this example with the news that eggs were contaminated with insecticide, Mr Mackenzie believes that Mars handled the media effectively and in a transparent way.

“With the eggs, it looks like there has been an attempt to play it down. And the number of eggs that were believed to have entered the UK rose from 21,000 to 700,000 in just one week,” he said.

“Granted, it’s more difficult to have any coordinated strategy in terms of tracking eggs. But more people are worried about the contamination of eggs than Mars products. You should be able to trace an egg from a consumer’s hand back to the chicken it came from.” 

According to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), under national and EU food rules, all food business have to keep traceability information – ‘one step forward and one step back’, i.e. records of from whom they received foods or food ingredients and (except in the case of retail sales) to whom it was supplied. And this information has to be supplied to the authorities on demand.

“The ability to trace and track products and ingredients is particularly important when food is unfit or unsafe and has to be withdrawn or recalled from the market.  The more detailed the traceability information kept, the narrower any recall or withdrawal will be,” a statement from the authority read.

“The FSAI deals with over 500 food incidents per year and overall our experience is that food businesses co-operate with withdrawals and recalls and provide the necessary detailed traceability information when asked or required to do so.”

Article written by Louise Kelly, Independent.

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