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Emydex opens New Product Development office

In line with continued growth and customer successes, Emydex this month (March 2013) opened a second office in Northwest Business Park that will focus purely on New Product Development (NPD).

The NPD team, led by Emydex co-founder and CTO, James Grennan and an initial team of three dedicated software engineers have moved to Unit 13, three doors down from Emydex’s main head office in Unit 10.
The existing offices in Unit 10 will now focus entirely on Emydex Customer Implementation projects, led by Daniel Simonavicius, as well as Customer Support, managed by Emydex’s Customer Service Manager, Lorna Daly. Daniel’s team of ten experienced programmers are responsible for the design and implementation of tailored systems for Emydex customers. Once customer systems are live and bedded-in, they are handed over to Lorna’s team of four dedicated programmers to support customer projects in-life.

James and his R&D team have an ambitious twelve month product development roadmap ahead of them to develop such systems as:

Emydex Standardised Systems (ESS): geared toward rollout of Emydex systems to smaller and medium sized food processors, systems that can also be customised and tailored by Emydex Value-added resellers and partners in overseas markets

Emydex On-Demand (EOD): a cloud-based iteration of the Emydex Production Management system whereby the central production server, usually hosted onsite in a customer’s factory is hosted in the cloud on a Microsoft Azure platform. Emydex software will still be loaded onto factory floor hardware devices such as PC terminals, handheld scanners and rugged Toughbook’s as normal. It will just mean all factory floor data captured will be securely stored in a centralised cloud-based production server, accessible from anywhere in the world.

Speaking on the recent move James Grennan commented “the R&D team now has the space and freedom to put some structure around the chaos that can be involved in brainstorming new ideas and designing new products and services. We have space to map our ideas, plans and designs that we didn’t have in Unit 10. Unit 13 gives us the mind-space to really focus on our product development plans in a big way”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO added “The move to Unit 13 frees up space in Unit 10 to extend both the Customer Implementation and Support teams. Unit 13 has enough square-footage to accommodate up to 20 additional people. This gives us some breathing space and room for further growth. Our business plans are to grow to around 40 people by the end of 2014.”

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7.5m Head of Livestock

Those in charge of the mammoth administrative task of buying and tracing 7.5m head of livestock per year in Ireland have emerged intact from the horse burger controversy.

Much of the credit must go to companies like Emydex in Dublin.

Emydex software is designed to manage food production processes from door to door, from arrival of animals to the abattoir, through kill line, boning hall, warehousing and dispatch.

The system includes real-time links to both the government-run animal movement and tracking systems as well as quality assurance schemes, and provides for full meat traceability.

It manages the complex system of payments to farmers, but also enables customers to run their food production lines more efficiently; manage, control and report on stock; analyse their yields and costs; and report on food chain traceability and factory and operator performance.

Today, Emydex is running in four out of the top five meat producing companies on the island of Ireland, and in more than 40 plants spread all over Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and France.

The company is celebrating its rollout in the Dawn Meats Group, one of the largest suppliers of Irish and British beef, pork and lamb in Europe, and an Emydex customer since 2007. It is planned to complete the Emydex roll-out across the group in 2013, including the lamb processing in Ballyhaunis.

Emydex also supplies software to Kepak, and the Dunbia Group and Moy Park in the UK. The software runs on any compatible hardware system.

Just how complex the challenge is can be seen in the very first step of the meat chain, procuring livestock and paying for them.

Each year, Irish export plants buy almost 1.4 million cattle, 2.5m sheep, and 3.5 million pigs …

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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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Seven new hires join the Emydex Team

In line with continued success in winning new business and company growth, Emydex is pleased to announce seven new hires to the team in various roles across the business.

Joining Lorna and Fran on the application support team are John Dennedy and Rolandas Sloveckas. John worked previously as a technical consultant with Synopsis in Dublin, before starting up his own company in 2007 supporting cross-platform IT solutions for both public and private sector customers like Friends First, Pfizer and SR Technics. John has a technology degree from Open-University and is a master certified network engineer.

Rolandas Sloveckas is the 4th Lithuanian to join the Emydex programming team, arriving to Ireland with 7 years programming experience. Rolandas holds a Bachelor’s degree in Informatics from the Gedimias Technical University in Vilnius.

Eimear O’Mahony joins Emydex as our new Office Manager. Prior to joining Emydex, Eimear worked for 3 years with DEM Machines supporting both their Sales and Service teams. Before that, Eimear worked in Eircom where she was a corporate account manager in Eircom’s retail business. In her capacity as Office Manager with Emydex, Eimear will support Lorna and the application support team in dealing with customer support enquiries and requests.

Having spent the past year working as a .Net developer with Keelings in Dublin, we are delighted that Andrius (Andrew) Urbelis re-joins Emydex as a senior programmer on the Customer Implementation Team. Andrew worked for 3 years as a .Net developer in Emydex prior to Keelings, and he holds a Bachelor’s degree in Informatics from the Kaunas University of Technology.

Stephen Keating also joins the Emydex programming team as a Senior Developer working on our Customer implementation team where he will work on projects to customise and configure Emydex software for food processing customers. Stephen holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Manufacturing Engineering from Trinity College Dublin as well as a Post Grad in Applied Science (Software Engineering) from University College Cork. Prior to joining Emydex, Stephen worked as a senior programmer with SoftCo Ltd for 4 years and as a Software Designer with Hewlett Packard in Leixlip for 11 years.

Just before Christmas 2012, two further additions to the Emydex programming team were Sean Gallager andEamonn Carolan, both recent graduates from the Dublin Business School.

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Emydex Customer Satisfaction – Nov 2012

With the overall aim of trying to constantly improve the quality of our software solutions, as well as customer service delivered to our clients, Emydex send a short Customer Satisfaction Survey to all our customers every six months.

The survey measures the satisfaction levels in the following areas:

  1. Quality of Solution (speed, performance, usability, overall product/solution performance)
  2. Execution Timeliness (how did we do against agreed project timelines?)
  3. Meeting Expectations (how did we measure up at the end versus expectations at the start?)
  4. Proactive Support (how did our customer support team fair?)
  5. Lead Programmer (how happy are you with your lead programmer?)
  6. Recommendation (how likely are you to recommend Emydex to a work colleague or friend?)

At least two representatives from each of our customers are invited to respond in order to get a broad picture of satisfaction levels across our entire customer base. In any case we strive to ensure at least one person responds on behalf of each customer.

Results from our most recent survey conducted in November 2012 show an increase in the level of Quality of Solution & Support e.g. the quality of the solution we give to our customers in terms of Usability, Speed and Performance. This metric rose from 79% to 82% when compared year on year.

A very positive result for Emydex staff and customers alike is that Overall Satisfaction levels continue to increase, a rise over the past year of 2.72% compared to last year’s figures to 80%. Also in relation to Overall Satisfaction levels, it’s worth noting that 95% of our respondents are either satisfied or very satisfied.

We are also delighted to say that, once again, in relation to the question regarding Recommendation the result has increased by 9.71% compared to the same period last year to 84%.

Another highlight from the November survey is that overall satisfaction in their Lead programmer rose nearly 5% from 82.5% in April 2012 to 86% in November 2012, the largest score recorded against any metric measured to date. An endorsement of Emydex’s policy that is to recruit, train and retain highly skilled programmers that also have many years relevant experience of working in the Food Processing Industries.

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