A NEW BEGINNING
The regulations relating to traceability which become effective in June 2005 are very constraining. It requires certain parts of the food-processing industry to seize the initiative, like at this fish merchant in La Rochelle. “I think we can compare the arrival of these regulations in the fisheries sector with the arrival of the Euro at the bank. We would never start our preparations early enough.”, explains the director, “Our AS400 applications are ready for the new regulations. We have been working with PYRESCOM for 10 years. The first AS400 applications were combined with Twinax solutions. All materials are now TCP/IP compatible and give us a greater flexibility in use. We have therefore trusted PYRESCOM with updating our material and operations procedures."

AUTOMATION
The environment in our cooled cutting rooms is very humid. The products used for cleaning and the saline environment are aggressive products for the material. We print the labels that we put on the fish cases. There aren’t any waterproof printers and the use of radio tags (RFID) is too expensive as labels are lost with the packaging. As a result, we have asked PYRESCOM to create a version of its industrial TERMOD into which we could integrate and protect the printers.” This fish merchant deals with almost 3500 different items, and the products handled change often. The TERMOD operators must be able to quickly select the item codes in order to be efficient. The post ergonomics are critical and we worked with PYRESCOM to find solutions based on touch screen technology”.

EVOLUTIONARY SOLUTIONS TRACEABILITY
The rules applied in the Fishing sector are evolving. “Programming the TERMOD is simple. It allows us to develop new applications.” The system set-up and live: it evolves as we like, with our needs. It is a data acquisition system set up with PYRESCOM. We’re trying to be a little ahead of the legislation. Some data, like the temperature of our cutting room during products packaging, is integrated into our IT systems. We can use this in our own way to achieve complete traceability.