Dungannon Meats takes on Marathon

A new IT system – ‘Marathon’ – which is designed to drive down costs at packaging outlets has been adopted by Dungannon Meats' production line.

According to solution providers Real Time Systems, downtime in the packaging department of the factory floor was a costly problem for meat packagers, and so 'Marathon' Endurance has been created to reduce downtime and the resulting loss of revenue.

Dungannon Meats' IT Manager, Brian Murphy, said: “We supply the major multiples in the UK and Ireland. Orders come in at eight in the morning and to ensure freshness they are shipped to the stores by the evening. If our system failed for as little as half an hour we could loose that days entire order.

"When Real Time Systems came to us with the Marathon Endurance solution promising 99.999% reliability of our system, we couldn’t quite believe it but after rigorous testing we were convinced that this was the only solution to our problem."

Dungannon Meats subsequently benefited from a massive increase in registration processing rates, from 100 registrations to 2500 per minute, and repairs to the systems now take four minutes instead of 20 minutes. On a regular day, the company experience no backlog problems.

Mr Murphy said that Marathon had "proved its worth" when it recovered a 25,000 registration backlog after a computer failure at the plant. As a result of having Marathon installed, the company recovered the backlog within 12 minutes.

Real Time Systems’ Managing Director, Patrick McAliskey, who was also the first person to introduce the now widely used Citrix solutions to Ireland, said: “Like Citrix I spent time and money bringing an innovative product to Ireland giving companies the opportunity for more efficiency and ultimately more profit.

"Marathon Assured Availability Solutions are perfect for any company where downtime is simply not acceptable. The technology can work over a range of products. It is not limited to food.

"Globally it is being used by financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, public safety and many other industries,” he added.

Real Time Systems are currently the only company in Ireland who offer companies the Marathon Endurance product.

(SP)