Dematic transforms John Dee’s beef supply chain for global success
RWTA Member, Dematic, have announced that John Dee, a family-owned Australian beef producer, has transformed its operations to enhance efficiency, productivity, accuracy, safety, and competitiveness to ensure its readiness for the evolving demands of global beef markets.
“We've been a beef processor in Warwick since 1945 and today we’ve transformed into a full-blown beef export and processing operation,” explains John Hart, Owner of John Dee, Warwick. “In the early days, we sold full sets of meat parts, whereas today we break them up and send different components to Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, the EU, and America.”
With growing demand, especially from international markets, John Dee faced a critical challenge. The company had outgrown its existing storage capacity, and manual operations were proving inadequate to meet the complexity and scale of their production.
“With the way we’re operating today, trying to get product into the right place at the right time, it was becoming almost impossible to do it by hand,” says Hart. “In our previous manual operation, people had to understand all the product codes and pick by hand out of a cold store. With over 10,000 cartons being produced a day, it became a logistical nightmare. A thousand cartons a year that would go out of date because they couldn't be located.”
