Case Studies

The Marel fish landing system has made life infinitely easier and improved the efficiency of operations for Southland Fish Supplies, a fish wholesaler and processor in Eden, New South Wales by simplifying the monitoring process. Southland needed to be able to identify the vessel per delivery, species, and grade form and customer order.

“The challenge was to find a registration and monitoring system that could cope with a multi-species fishery,” says Managing Director Steve Buckless. “We land up to 170 different species of fish throughout the year in numerous grades and forms.” The Marel fish landing system is the perfect solution.

The Sydney Fish Market barcoding system

Finding the right solution
The fish registration and monitoring system developed by Marel and Southland consists of a single M2200 packing scale and printer, along with the Innova software which registers data such as vessel, species, grade, weight, form, etc. The system prints out order specific labels for each product that matches the Sydney Fish Market’s barcoding system. Southland also assigns some of the fish they land to further processing, in which case the order label displays the date and time. This makes it easy to track, the “use by date”, which provides a level of product traceability back to the catching vessel.

It is enough of a job to keep track of all this data but Southland’s operation is further complicated by compliance regulations of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA). With mixed boxes that contain more than one fish species, AFMA requires each species to be weighed individually for its quota and compliance regulations. Prior to the installation of the Marel system, this information was recorded manually and duplicated 3-4 times to meet various requirements.

Eliminating manual handling of data

In order to monitor compliance with fish quotas, AFMA regulations also require fish species that are monitored for overfishing to be reported per vessel delivery. This information is also submitted in handwritten form and the AFMA then manually enters the data into its computer system. Southland is now in the process of obtaining approval to instead use a data file generated by Innova, which would eliminate the double handling and re-entry of the data required by AFMA.

Southland is studying other areas where Innova could help to eliminate manual handling of data. For example, Southland generates a manifest for each customer order, which is sent to the various markets advising the customer of what products is en-route to them. In the case of the Sydney Fish Market, the largest fish market in Australia, the data in the manifest is manually entered into their computer system so that their barcodes can be matched with species, grade and form. With an electronic manifest, the data could be sent automatically to the market’s computer system, allowing the information to be processed in a much more efficient way.

“After heavy consultation with Marel Australia, we were able to replicate our manual system using the Innova weighing system in a very user friendly package,” says Steve Buckless. “This has streamlined our weighing and reporting process by removing the duplication of handwritten reports, giving us improved efficiencies throughout the business.”

One-stop shop is the answer
In addition to using Innova in its wholesale business, Southland plans to expand its use into the processing operations as well, such as to monitor yield capture of their filleting process and to provide full traceability for the products that they ship to market.