Meat processing company John Dee has been undertaking significant expansion at its Warwick facility to increase its competitiveness and operational efficiency.
With the build and fit-out being the largest investment in the business since it began operating 80 years ago, funding was provided through the federal government’s Building Better Regions Fund, with Wiley the project manager.
John Dee, Warwick owner John Hart said the expansion came as beef exports were rising significantly. “The Warwick facility supplies thousands of varieties of beef cuts to more than 145 customers in over 37 export markets, and those numbers are only growing,” he said.
As part of the fitout, the company chose the Multishuttle Meat Buffer Storage and Handling System from Dematic. The automated solution is designed to optimise facility operations and provide better workplace safety by overcoming the challenges associated with working in sub-zero conditions. It has also been purpose-designed so John Dee can scale up and increase its premium beef export market share.
Wiley CEO Rob Barron said the ability to scale was key for the client. “In selecting Dematic for this project, we were able to ensure that we were working with a system that was able to adapt and cater for the future growth of John Dee, with the ability to increase productivity to match significant surges in demand, whilst also providing improved worker safety,” Barron said.
Based on its Multishuttle Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS), Dematic said it provides companies with a range of advantages over post-production manual distribution and despatch, with multiple aisles accommodating for both chilled and frozen environments with the flexibility to cater for any future temperature changes required by different markets.
Dematic business development manager Soeren Schauki said: “These features are beneficial when exporting products from frozen and chilled storage environments for markets where the cold supply chain is anticipated to mature and expand over the next few years, particularly in export markets such as China, Vietnam and greater Southeast Asia.”
The four-aisle, 30-level Multishuttle solution automatically stores product cartons coming out of production, then builds and sequences them for manual and automated palletisation and direct container loading.
Dematic said this improves operational efficiency, productivity, transparency and order precision, while also addressing the needs of an increasingly complex supply chain. Two aisles manage products chilled to -1°C and the other two manage products frozen at -20°C, which reduces reliance on staff to build and lift heavy cartons in the harsh environments.
Schauki said the John Dee installation includes a frozen aisle that the company can switch to chilled in response to anticipated growth and advancements in cold supply chain export markets across Asia.
“Our advanced Multishuttle system provides a high performance, accurate, safe and cost-effective automated order fulfilment and despatch processing solution for Australia’s meat industry,” Schauki said.
