The Company

Glanbia PLC is well known for its cheese production but the company also provide a range of nutritional ingredients for dairy and non-dairy products used in the food, beverage and nutritional products markets. Glanbia employ more than 6,900 people across 34 countries and distribute their products in over 130 countries. Over 1,800 of these employees are based within Glanbia Ireland, which operates 11 processing plants and 53 agri branches. Glanbia Ireland own various brands such as Avonmore, Kilmeaden Cheese, Premier Milk, mymilkman and GAIN Animal Nutrition. They process milk from 21 countries and export high quality dairy and agri ingredients and branded products in over 60 countries.

Glanbia Ireland built a new state of the art milk processing facility at Belview Port in Co. Kilkenny, Ireland costing over €180m. The plant opened early in 2015 and is one of the biggest facilities of its kind in Europe, with the capacity to produce up to 100,000 tonnes of nutritional dairy powders annually.

The Challenge

Glanbia needed a fully integrated Yard Management System that would incorporate weighing facilities, vehicle recognition, driver recognition, route planning, access control, milk testing, offloading and unmanned weighbridges. After researching the Irish marketplace for a weighbridge supplier with the knowledge and experience to deliver the project, they appointed GlobeWeigh Group.

Our Solutions

We’ve been with them every step of the way from planning the system, supplying all the necessary equipment and installing both hardware and software solutions. We utilised WinWeigh software which has several thousand installations throughout Europe, and our locally manufactured weighbridges. The project has been a huge success.

The yard management process we developed operates as follows:

Entry to the Plant

On arrival, vehicles are identified using RFID tags. Once the vehicle is identified the driver will use their read/write ID card to gain access to the site via driver operated terminals.

Inbound Weighing

Once access to the site has been granted the driver proceeds to the inbound weighbridge and the total weight of the vehicle is recorded.

Product Quality Check

The vehicle proceeds to the charm test station where the milk is tested for the presence of antibiotics. The driver is identified using their read-write card.

Offloading

Once the charm test is complete, the driver is allocated a bay to offload the milk.

Outbound Weighing

The vehicle is weighed again before leaving the Bellevue site using the outbound weighbridge and proceeds towards the exit.

Outbound Identification

The vehicle is again identified using RFID and the driver operates a barrier system using his read-write card to exit the plant.

The Impact

Glanbia Ireland’s yard management system proved to be a phenomenal success. As a result, we were asked to work with the team on replicating our solutions across other Glanbia sites. We’ve since installed versions of Glanbia Yard Management (GYM) on the Ballyragget site in Wexford and on their Virginia site.

For more details contact us:

Tel (Armagh): +44 28 3889 4102
Tel (Cork): +353 21 431 8388
E: sales@globeweighgroup.com