Careers Contact Downloads |

Food Processing Software Solutions

Other Processing

Home / Archives for Industry News / Other Processing

An accurate diagnosis and treatment

When South African medical device manufacturer Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing needed to replace a manual paper-based quality control system, they looked North to Emydex to advise and assist in implementing an electronic solution.

Introducing the client

Emydex has a strong presence in Sub-Saharan Africa working with their local market partner, Summit Process Solutions, with offices in Pretoria and Cape Town. Together Emydex and Summit have 10 customers spread across South Africa, Namibia and Botswana operating 17 separate plants, each operating Emydex at the core.

The partnership recently added Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing, based in South Africa, to their client base. Marlin Laboratories is a specialist in the design, manufacture, and implementation of reverse osmosis water purification systems for the renal industry in South Africa. The company’s service teams regularly provide servicing and measuring the quality of the water, to life-saving dialysis machines installed across South Africa.

All Emydex clients are important and an integral part of industry supply chains within the countries in which they operate. As specialists in the food supply chain, it was interesting to see how easily the Emydex software was customisable to support Marlin Laboratories. This was particularly sensitive to drive quality control, as it operates in the critical healthcare arena where Quality is a matter of life and death.

The opportunity

Marlin Laboratories, in addition to their manufacturing competence, have a team of 25 in-field service technicians working at over 200 sites in hospitals throughout South Africa. Increasing volumes, together with increased reporting and compliance requirements, created the need to evaluate a solution to address the challenges of their manual and paper-based process.

The manual processes were becoming a challenge for the field technicians as well as the back-office finance and administration head office team. There were various bottlenecks at month end caused by increased data gathering at each site, followed by regional consolidation of the data being sent to the Head Office, causing a challenge in responding to their client needs.

This was the initial motivation to consider a new approach, together with the many obvious benefits of moving from a paper based to a digital solution. The additional benefits envisaged improved data accuracy, consistency, predictable process efficiencies as well as integration logistics and finance systems.

“The drive to make this change came from a need to improve operational efficiency plus the heavy demands of evidence-based compliance within the medical industry bodies together with the needs for governance and risk management for our own clients.”
Mark Pretorius, CEO, Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing

Emydex and Summit Process Solutions were tasked to review the existing processes and to recommend the design for an advanced mobile technology-based solution that would simplify and standardise the business processes and business model.

What we did

Emydex and Summit worked closely with Marlin Laboratories Management and field technicians to examine existing processes, how they worked and how we could create improvements and streamline their existing processes and operations.

“The major challenge for Marlin Laboratories was the volume of paperwork created at every site visit. As we worked through that, we highlighted other opportunities to enhance training and skills by implementing a standardised technology based approach for Training and Operations, to improve the productivity of each engineer in the servicing of the more than 700 units across the country.”
Jeffrey Macer-Wright, Technical Director, Summit Process Solutions

This was precisely the sort of challenge the Emydex Enterprise Quality Management System (EQMS) was built for. EQMS is a software system that allows various industry operations to be analysed and to be captured in process steps in consistent procedures. This approach not only covers steps for each individual, but also next steps and actions for other colleagues involved in the end-to-end process-based workflow.

With the workflow capturing the confirmation of actions and relevant data, complete results are then accurately loaded into the cloud based database for access by Head Office enabling real time response and reporting for completed tasks, replacing many manual tasks.

The application can run in either on-line mode or in offline mode with data synchronisation with the cloud at convenient times.

Going Live

The system went live, country-wide, toward the end of 2019.
Ongoing reviews of the new system and other back office legacy systems will continue to yield productivity and efficiency improvements with effective reporting and data analysis.

“Since going live, we have continued with ongoing process reviews of the new system as we further optimise productivity and take further steps for integration with our other back office processes for logistics and finance systems”
Mitch WIshart, Service and Training Manager, Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing

The results

The results and benefits from the introducing the new system are now being experienced in various ways. According to the team at Marlin Laboratories, the new Emydex tablet based EQMS has brought about several improvements:

  • Asset management has been enhanced
  • All completed workflows and reports are uploaded from the service locations eliminating paperwork bottlenecks experienced at month end.
  • Accuracy has improved, with proof through reports and evidence-based compliance
  • Immediate access to data in validating results of current and trend results
  • Visibility of team performance and where there might be areas for improvement
  • Logistics are being simplified, with tracking of spare parts and consumables feeding into parts management which helps planning and projections
  • Compliance and traceability has improved

In other's words

“Moving from a paper-based system to state-of-the-art technology is a business engineering project that involves everyone in the team. Technology in the workflows running on a tablet standardised everything for us. The team have embraced the transformation.

The team on the ground with varying skill levels have all benefited from the standardisation. It proves that Emydex can help small companies like us to leverage the cloud-based technologies previously only available to large enterprises.”
Jen Marques, Emydex systems Administrator, Marlin Laboratory Manufacturing

Contact Sales in any of our Dublin, Brisbane, South Africa or Toronto offices

Request a Demo

Emydex Live in World’s Largest Ostrich Processor

OUDTSHOORN – SOUTH AFRICA:

World’s Largest Ostrich Processor

Established in 1985, Klein Karoo is the world’s largest Ostrich processor, producing 65% of all Ostrich related products found on international markets. Klein Karoo represents more than 800 local farmer members, and produces ostrich meat, leather and feathers. Klein Karoo supplies Ostrich (Poultry) meat, including the famous ‘fan fillet’ to the local South African market, as well as to a growing number of export markets including the UK, Denmark and Sweden where Klein Karoo’s pre-grilled Ostrich meat is today available in five of the largest retailers in Europe.

With its head-quarters in the town of Oudtshoorn, located on the garden route in South Africa, the company operates a large number of processing factories in the region including three separate Ostrich Slaughter and deboning plants located in Oudtshoorn, Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam, as well as a number of other processing facilities including value-added processing, pet treat, pre-grill and Biltong processing operations.

Working in conjunction with a South African Industrial Engineering Company (iPlan Global), Klein Karoo invited Emydex to tender in July 2015, for a factory floor software solution to replace their existing production control systems that were deemed to be end-of-life. Klein Karoo sought to adopt a “leapfrog” strategy in the selection of their new software system i.e., a technological solution appropriate for 2016 and beyond. They also requested a centralised enterprise system in order to maintain one “single version of the truth”. Finally, the system they sought needed to be agile and flexible so as to allow for scale and speed to incorporate business change such as acquisitions.

Kill Line Software Live in Three Plants

Following a thorough tender process, including a project discovery and scoping exercise in South Africa, Emydex were awarded the Klein Karoo contract in January 2016. A team of Emydex developers working remotely from Dublin in close collaboration with Klein Karoo in South Africa, commissioned and configured Emydex software systems for Klein Karoo’s three Abattoir operations, boning halls and value added operations for both Local and Export Markets. A team of Emydex Senior software engineers implemented Emydex systems into the groups three plants over the Summer months of 2016, such that by the end of August all Emydex systems were live and in operation across all processing plants, without any major issues. In tandem, Emydex integrated with Klein Karoo’s new back-office ERP system, Syspro, that was implemented in parallel by iPlan Global.

Commenting on the system go-lives Karoo’s project manager said “The operators at both Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam had a positive experience with Emydex following go-live, and the general consensus is that Emydex seems much simpler and faster to use than their current system. Also taking into account the fact that the users at Swellendam saw the screens for the first time on the morning of go-live, and had no major issues transacting. So overall a positive experience from an end-user’s perspective. The Emydex developers were very helpful during their visit and didn’t shy away from finding on-site solutions or the long hours.”

Full Traceability Reporting

Commenting on the perceived benefits for the business following the system go-live, Cobus Pretorius, Production & logistics Co-Ordinator with Klein Karoo said “The Emydex program interface is really user friendly, and makes navigating through the system very easy, and also the filtering option on all Emydex client screens, make lookups quick and easy. The suite of full traceability reports are easy to navigate, and will save us a lot of time. In addition, the fact that all information and reporting can be extracted to Excel also has a lot of benefits for our business.” Commented Pretorius

He went on to add “from a Warehousing perspective the full scanning throughout the Emydex system is a big step forward for our company, we can already see the huge benefits this gives us in terms of proper stock control. Also by fully integrating with our new financial system, Emydex has eliminated all the work that we had to manually duplicate before. Naturally the human error with regards to these manual duplicated transactions has also been removed.

The automatic integration between our Graaff Reinet & Swellendam plants in terms of carcass shipments to our primary processing facility in Oudtshoorn has also saved us a lot of time and trouble. Lastly, the way labels are set up, and the ability we have to change them with little or no input from Emydex, as well as the fact that we can preview the labels before we have to actually print, is something that I rate as one of my top three system improvements!”

Recipe Formulation Software

“Finally, the Emydex Recipe system, which is something new to Klein Karoo, works really well and we can see that it actually gives the factory workers a sense of pride in actually “measuring” what they are doing and not just blindly mixing bathes. This also ensures that the correct products are used in the correct quantities for all the recipes. The last benefit I would add is that having the ability to be able to trouble-shoot quickly by being able to connect to the actual floor pc’s have made life much easier!” added Cobus Pretorius.

Reflecting on the project’s success, Charl du Plessis, Managing Director of Klein Karoo International said “to incorporate Emydex slaughter, de-boning and recipe functionality into a single business entity in such a short time-frame was great achievement in my opinion”. David McMahon, Emydex CEO added “the Klein Karoo project was definitely one of the most ambitious and potentially challenging projects we have ever had to tackle. The fact that the go-lives went so smoothly, over the various project phases coming in quick succession over the Summer, is down to the hard work and many months of preparation and testing invested by Klein Karoo, iPlan and Emydex working in partnership as a unified team”.

For more information on our Poultry Processing Software click here

Request a Demo

Traceability System Live in La Rousse Foods

DUBLIN/BELFAST – IRELAND:
With operations located in Dublin and Belfast, La Rousse Foods specialise in the supply of fine foods to premium food establishments since 1992. Acquired by the Swiss-based food group Aryzta in 2015, the company has more than 1,300 corporate customers in Ireland, and have their own catering butchery, cheese-maturing room and chocolate lab. La Rousse offer a wide range of fresh, seasonal and innovative premium produce from a network of local and international producers.

La Rousse approached Emydex in 2014 with a requirement to implement a robust factory floor Traceability and Production management system to replace manual operations in both their Cheese Processing and Butchery Operations. La Rousse were looking for a factory floor IT system that would provide them with real-time, accurate reporting on production, yields and Stocks, with full forwards and backwards food chain Traceability from factory door to door. For shop floor equipment La Rousse opted to implement Bizerba industrial weighing scales, harsh environment terminals as well as printers.

They were previously operating a paper based Traceability and Quality Assurance recording and reporting system, which was time consuming to both administer and report on. Stock control was also a manual operation which was labour intensive and time consuming. Previously the Cheese Operations area operated with a Microsoft Dynamics Nav system, whereby Purchase Orders for Intake were keyed directly into a Nav form running on an office PC located at Cheese Intake.

Weights and traceability information were later keyed in manually against the purchase orders. La Rousse identified a requirement for a software system that fully integrated with Navision in real time and replaced the manual in-put of weights and traceability information, as well as to manage the processing, packing, order picking and dispatch of cheeses to end-customers.

In parallel, La Rousse were planning to double the size of their existing catering butchery operations by building a new purpose-built state-of-the-art butchery on a site adjacent to their existing operation in Dublin. For this new operation, La Rousse also needed a factory floor system capable of production managing this new production facility from factory door-to-door.

Cheese Processing Software

Phase one of the project saw the rollout of Emydex’s Production Management Software to the Cheese Operations covering intake, processing & packing, picking & dispatch, returns both to/from suppliers and customers and QC Hold.  Due to the flexible nature of the software, Emydex were able to integrate to la Rousse’s existing Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP system, providing a seamless real-time interface between both systems.

Packing and Processing Software

Phase two was a much more substantial project seeing the rollout of Emydex’s Packing & Processing software module to the new catering butchery operation running on fifteen  Bizerba  industrial terminals, connected to  Bizerba Industrial Weighing scales and printers covering operations such as Intake, Debagging, Deboning, Dry Aging, Preparation Lines, Metal Detection and Packing. Emydex’s Warehouse management module is also installed, running on a number of intelligent handheld scanning terminals covering Internal stock movements as well as sales order picking and dispatch.

Today La Rousse now have a comprehensive Production management software system that is fully integrated with their back-office ERP system.

Commenting on the Emydex project, David McMahon, Emydex CEO said “La Rousse Foods were a great fit customer for Emydex to work with. A professional run company from the outset, the La Rousse Foods project team had a clear vision as to their system needs, with defined project objectives and requirements. They were insistent in seeking to understand the precise inputs and outputs to each and every stage of their production processes, with the result that today they have an Emydex system that provides both bullet-proof traceability processes, as well as accurate and real-time accurate reporting on Production, Yields and Stocks.”

Stuart Campbell, General Manager with La Rousse Foods added “Emydex have provided us with a robust Factory Floor Traceability and Production Management system for both our Cheese Processing and Butchery Operations. Our Management team now have accurate real time reporting on production, yields and stocks as well as full forwards and backwards food chain traceability from factory door to door.”

Request a Demo