Yields & Costings

Clogherhead Fishermen’s Co-Op: Labelling at Sea

14th June 2017

Clogherhead Fisherman’s Co-Op, is a leading Irish Seafood producer based in Clogherhead, Co. Louth, on the East Coast of Ireland. This video describes how Clogherhead Co-Op use Emydex’s Production Management and Traceability software on their fleet of trawlers as well as throughout their processing factory for data capture, labelling of product at sea, landings, into-warehousing, sales order picking and dispatch, providing Clogherhead Co-Op with real-time and accurate Traceability reporting from boat-to-truck.

Emydex’s Labelling at Sea software operating on the fleet of twelve frozen at sea trawlers, enables on-vessel printing, meaning product arrives to shore already labelled, saving time and ensuring full Traceability from the boat to the customer.

<!–Clogherhead Co-Op Video–>

Processing and Traceablility

Project Highlights

“The key for me is that Emydex were able to provide Clogherhead with their standard fish system built in consultation with BIM (Irish Fisheries Board), the SFPA (Seafood Fisheries Protection Agency), as well as the GS1 (Global Standards agency), but allow Clogherhead to tailor and tweak the system to suit our specific needs and processes exactly.
Aside from our old factory floor system, we also previously operated a bespoke-built boat invoicing and payments system.

Emydex were able to configure and build into their standard Fish system, the very same functionality as our previous system, meaning we now have everything we need in a single system, supported in-life by the Emydex support team. After a year at sea, the Co-op that includes the factory and fleet of boats all see the efficiencies and savings realised from our new labelling-at-sea systems”

Paul Boyd, Managing Director – Clogherhead Co-Op

“This project included a first for Emydex, in that our software is now operating on a fleet of boats in an offline environment, but at the same time has proved very successful. Hopefully over time this is something that will be adopted by the fishing industry as a whole”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO

Yield & Costing Analysis in the Food industry

6th March 2017

NORTH AMERICA:

The food industry is no different than any other complex manufacturing business whose goal is to make a profit. If you are not able to calculate your true manufacturing cost, it could lead to lost profits, orders and customers. To remain profitable, you need to answer a number of questions; Are you pricing your products to make a profit? Are you producing the products at the cost you calculated? Are you contributing to overhead and profit levels to meet your strategic business goals?

In the food industry, there are very small margins, making it difficult for food companies to achieve and maintain profitability. One of the first lessons of accounting is the equation of Profit = Revenues – Costs

In the food industry, the volumes are fairly flat, growth is slow, so food processing companies need to be focused on managing costs as the best option to improve profitability. Determining what are the product and customer costs is not as simple as it seems in the food industry. Over the last 15 years many food companies have either gone out of business or been bought out by a larger company due to lack of profit.

Current state of ERP vendors able to support the food industry costing

Food companies are not able to calculate accurate costs with their current software systems due to limitations in these systems required to support food industry requirements. The quality and specification of raw materials vary significantly from vendor to vendor and at different times of the year. This is especially true in the meat industry where each species carcass is a different size and weight, so for example, each ham or loin produced has different amounts of lean/fat, bone and trim.

The process of blending, mixing and cooking can produce different yield losses depending on the attributes of the raw materials used, and the setup of the equipment. ERP vendor software is not designed to track and measure yield loss tracking as the product moves through the various food production processes.

Due to the limitations in the costing functionality, many companies use manual (spreadsheet) calculations to determine product costs. While spreadsheets may work for smaller, ad-hoc analysis, they fall short in handling massive complex costing processes due to their limitations with scalability, data integrity, integration and security. They are also open to clerical error (no validation), and are typically reliant on a few key individuals within the organisation. The ‘hit by a bus’ risk is a cause for concern.

Furthermore, manual cost calculations are then fed into some type of profitability analysis, but the challenge is that the manual data capture is flawed, making these analyses less than optimal. For food companies to survive in the current economy they require accurate and complete profitability information.

Addressing the challenge of calculating costs

From the big picture perspective, it is relatively easy to calculate profit. Total up all your revenue and expense accounts and calculate the difference between the two. This tells you that in total income made or lost, but at a macro level. The calculation of profit for specific products or customers can easily explode into a massive undertaking. Companies do not know where to look to address their profitability issues.

The current situation of limitations of profitable reporting is a direct correlation with the challenges the food manufacturers face when calculating accurate cost results – lack of an automated costing process, substantial manual processes, lack of operational measurement to ensure accuracy of results and lack of granularity.

Food companies have tried different approaches to address the costing requirement. They have tried sophisticated spreadsheets, in some cases using a network of complex spreadsheets. Others have attempted to modify their ERP or Financial (GL) systems to handle the advance costing needs of the food industry, but often these modifications fail to deliver a comprehensive cost system. Lastly, companies have embarked on building their own custom cost system from the ground up. While these systems will give the company exactly the costing system they want, it comes at a significant cost of time, money and resources.

Operational costing systems are the next generation of solutions created specifically to handle the complex costing and measurement environments encountered by food process manufactures. These package solutions that integrate with your existing ERP or Financial System allow companies to rapidly gain access to detailed cost data that that is specific to their food production process. Access to detailed product information brings a whole new level of insight on operation performance and arms the Operational Management team with information to effectively manage and implement continuous improvement projects to reduce costs.

By adding an operational costing and measurement system to the existing business systems, food manufactures can remedy many of the symptoms that produce an ailing cost process.

How Operational Costing in the Food Industry Improves Profitability

Your competitor just undercut your price, so to be competitive in the market you’re probably thinking that all you have to do is meet or beat your competitor’s price to get the deal. Let’s just reduce or eliminate the overhead contribution, and quote the price based on the materials and labour, then mark up the cost to meet the company profit margins. Right? Wrong. There are many manufacturing companies who price on the basis of what their competitors charge or the market price, without considering whether their competitors have a different cost structure or knowing their own true manufacturing costs. If you base your prices on what others are doing, you’ll never know if you’re taking in profitable business.

Instead, adopt a different approach that will bring in profitable business while remaining competitive, by implementing Emydex’s Yield and Costing Module that is a fully integrated component of the Emydex Production Management Platform, that is tightly integrated to your existing ERP or Financial System.

Yields & Costings Module, on Emydex Core Platform, integrated to back-office ERP

With the recipe BOM (Bill of Materials), Emydex is able to model the flow of raw materials, ingredients, packaging, resources and overhead through the food production process. By monitoring actual costs and product movement through the process, Emydex is able to generate yield variances, and measure the financial impact of production using standard reports to validate the accuracy of the costing standards.

These costs and variances can be integrated with your existing financial system to provide a more global analysis of profitability.

By knowing the true costs of producing products at your food plant, Emydex’s Yield & Costings software gives you the knowledge needed to make strategic and operational decisions that will keep your business profitable.

Terry McCorriston, Authorised Distributor, Emydex North America

Emydex Canada / North America

Terry McCorriston Consulting
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Kitchener, Ontario
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T: + 001 519 500 0540

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Email – sales@emydex.com

Emydex Live in World’s Largest Ostrich Processor

7th December 2016

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

Beef Processing Software Live in MeatCo Namibia

5th November 2016

WINDHOEK – NAMIBIA:

The Emydex implementation team returned to Ireland after the latest phase of Emydex system deployments at MeatCo’s two main production sites located in Windhoek and Okahandja, Namibia. At this stage Emydex’s factory floor data capture and production reporting software is now operational from factory door-to-door in both of MeatCo’s main beef primal processing plants, from Kill line through to boning hall processing & packing, sales order picking & dispatch.

In addition to their main primal processing plants, Emydex is now also installed in two further processing plants on the MeatCo Windhoek site that are the Wholesale and Cannery processing plants. Current plans are for MeatCo’s IT staff to themselves complete the Emydex systems roll-out to its other two beef processing plants located North of the veterinary fence in Oshikati and Katima Mulilo. Both deployments will be supported remotely by Emydex’s Implementation team of developers based in Emydex’s HQ in Dublin, Ireland.
At this point there are just under 100 Emydex data capture devices (consisting of PC terminals and hand-held scanners) installed across MeatCo’s four plants operational with Emydex, that include a number of Animal Health and Quality Assurance inspection stations on both Kill line systems, as well as Industrial PC stations covering Dentition, Grading, Primal labelling, Carton Packing, VET Seals, Recipe formulation and Dry Goods stock management.

The Emydex system in MeatCo also provides functionality for 3rd party carcass intake, carcass splitting as well as dispatch. The system is fully integrated to MeatCo’s group wide-ERP system (Sage X3), and has interfaces built to a number of 3rd party Cold Stores in both Africa and Europe.

Having tested and implemented the Emydex kill line & payments system in the Okahandja plant, the same kill line system was later installed in Windhoek over a weekend, going live the following Monday. A fast paced install. “The MeatCo kill line is unique compared to our European kill line systems”, said Emydex CEO David McMahon, “Grading is carried out over two separate stations for example, one per side, allowing different destinations to be associated with each side of an animal, allowing for condemnation or part condemnation of only one side of an animal.”

Commenting on the completion of this main phase of the Emydex project that took just over 12 months to complete, McMahon said “MeatCo have been the ideal customer for Emydex to work with. Highly professional and organised with regard to working with our development and implementation teams on the planning, testing, training and go-live phases of the project. The project ran smoothly over the past 12 months, and we’re delighted to hear now that MeatCo feel they have the sufficient knowledge, in-house capabilities and confidence to continue themselves with completion of our system roll-out to their two remaining processing plants. Our support team will be on-hand to support them 24/7 should it be required.”

Nico Weck, MeatCo’s Group Chief Financial Officer said “Now that the Emydex installation is complete in both our main processing operations, we have a robust Traceability control and reporting system in place that provides our management team with real-time feedback on our production processes. The flexibility that is inherent within Emydex means we can quickly and easily add additional reporting as it is required by the business. ”
For more information on our Beef Processing Software click here

Traceability System Live in La Rousse Foods

1st September 2016

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.”

Fish Processing Software live in Fish Factory & 12 Trawlers

31st May 2016

LOUTH – IRELAND:
Clogherhead Co-op based in Co. Louth on the East Coast of Ireland, is one of Ireland’s leading Seafood Processors. The Co-Op operate a twelve-strong fleet of modern fishing trawlers, as well as an impressive collective of skilled manpower. The Co-operative’s core offering is frozen at sea prawns, with the balance made up of whitefish species including monkfish, cod and hake.

The Co-Op supplies both domestic as well as export market countries including Italy, France, Spain and Holland. All of the vessels boast newly installed ‘frozen at sea’ equipment allowing Prawns to be handpicked and quickly frozen, ensuring exemplary quality, freshness and traceability. The boats can also stay at sea for longer, substantially decreasing the Co-op’s carbon footprint.

Traceability System

As part of the Irish Government’s ‘eLocate’ scheme launched to encourage the implementation of electronic traceability systems within the Irish seafood industries, Clogherhead Co-op approached Emydex with a requirement to replace their existing factory floor Production Reporting and traceability system, with a new modern software system that was flexible to make changes easily and quickly, and that could interface with the required Irish fishery body systems such as the SFPA.

Clogherhead also needed a system that would reduce time spent labelling products as they landed. They sought a system that could be installed on their fleet of twelve trawlers allowing for frozen prawns to be barcoded and labelled at Sea with all required traceability information, enabling speedy and accurate landings into the factory on arrival at port.

Onshore Weigh Labelling

Emydex installed their factory floor software system into the Clogherhead factory including the Emydex Packing & Processing module used for weigh-labelling of product, as well as the Emydex Warehouse Management module used to manage and report on all factory stocks.

Offshore Weigh Labelling

In addition Emydex’s new labelling-at-sea software systems were installed on the Co-Ops fleet of boats to enable labelling of fixed weight prawns into both inner and outer boxes at sea.
The boat system also allows for the labelling of shellfish at the time and place of catch, capturing traceability information including catch date, catch area and use by date for example, meaning they just have to scan the boxes into intake on shore. Sean Gallagher, Emydex’s Project Manager commented “one of the challenges that Emydex faced with the roll-out of our boat system was that once the boat left the port, it was offline. This meant we could only iron out any issues later identified once the boat came back to shore. So we focused on ensuring we had the first boat running smoothly, before we rolled it out to a further few boats and then eventually all twelve in the fleet”. Lastly Emydex was configured with new functionality to allow the Co-Op to reconcile boats catches, with customer invoices, allowing payments to their suppliers, the boat owners.

Today Clogherhead Co-op are running the Emydex system within their factory from door-to-door. The bulk of product is landed from the boat fleet, pre-labelled at sea with bar-codes, facilitating speedy and accurate intake of frozen product. This means the Co-op no longer have to commit time and resources to the labelling of products as they arrive on shore, given they’re already labelled at sea.

Streamlined Intake Process

This new streamlined intake process allows Clogherhead to scan in the pre-labelled boxes directly to their stores and dispatch from there as required. Any product not labelled at sea can be weigh-labelled on a fixed position intake terminal located on the dry dock. The Emydex back-office system provides management and supervisors with real-time and accurate reporting on factory stocks, production as well as both forward and backward traceability reporting.

Commenting on the Emydex project, Paul Boyd, Managing Director with Clogherhead Co-op said “The key for me is that Emydex were able to provide Clogherhead with their standard fish system built in consultation with BIM, the SFPA, as well as the GS1, but allow Clogherhead to tailor and tweak the system to suit our specific needs and processes exactly. Aside from our old factory floor system, we also operated a bespoke-built boat invoicing and payments system. Emydex were able to configure and build into their standard Fish system, the very same functionality as our previous system, meaning we now have everything we need in a single system, supported in-life by the Emydex support team. After a year at sea, the Co-op that includes the factory and fleet of boats all see the efficiencies and savings realised from our new labelling-at-sea systems”

David McMahon, Emydex CEO added “This project included a first for Emydex, in that our software is now operating on a fleet of boats in an offline environment, but at the same time has proved very successful. Hopefully over time this is something that will be adopted by the fishing industry as a whole”