FDBusiness.com

Dublin-based Principal Logistics Technologies, a warehouse management solutions provider, has won a major contract with Dale Farm in Cookstown, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, to provide a warehouse management system to manage raw materials into production, bulk product from production, through to distribution and incorporating its entire supply chain.

Dale Farm is part of the United Dairy Farmers Group, a UK dairy farmer co-operative with five world class centre’s of excellence throughout the UK – Dunmanbridge (cheese and milk powders), Pennybridge (fresh milk, cream and juice products), Dromona (butter and dairy spreads), Rowan Glen in Scotland (yogurt and probiotic drinks) and Kendal in Cumbria (yogurt, desserts and cottage cheese) exporting to over 45 countries worldwide.

“We first worked with Dale Farm in 2012 on their Cumbria site. We deployed a barcode scanning handheld warehouse management solution integrated to their MS NAV ERP system. In 2014, we were selected again to deploy a high volume voice picking solution for their Pennybridge site. We are delighted that such a significant dairy manufacturer continues to adopt our solutions and it is a really good endorsement of both our products and staffs expert abilities,” says Joe O’Shea (pictured), Commercial Manager of Principal Logistics Technologies.

Stephen Walker, IT Applications Manager at United Dairy Farmers/Dale Farm, comments: “Dale Farm are investing up to £40 million into the Dunmanbridge cheese production facility at Cookstown, County Tyrone. We identified the need for an application that can manage our requirements now, but can also be adopted to cater for future growth. Central to our needs was an application that can interface with our existing ERP systems, weigh scales, label printers and then in real-time facilitate system directed flow of materials into and from production, giving us yield calculations and full traceability by day code and batch. After an extensive search we once again choose In-DEX WMS as its flexibility and functionality are hard to beat.”

“Cheese production offers unique challenges given the fast and harsh nature of the production environment and also the storage duration,” says Joe O’Shea. “Chemical, biological & grading processes occur over its life and that affects the stored products characteristics. These need to be maintained and recorded at all times. Additionally the product is often held in external third party sites meaning that there is interfacing to these third party systems, including the in-house manufacturing and ERP system.”

“All activities across the site will be managed by In-DEX from raw material into production, finished goods from production, grading & retail cheese cutting. We will have full traceability across the entire supply chain, yield management and live visual dashboards across the site and all our third parties facilities,” adds Stephen Walker.