Most businesses will have a wide gap between their top price items and some regular and mundane lines. But how about a range from €500,000 to five cents? The top one in this case is more of a system than a single product, a sophisticated device for testing milk for protein, lactose and so on. It is extremely sophisticated, but then so is today’s EU payment scheme for dairy farmers and such tests affect the levels of payment which in turn means that level of investment is warranted.
Daragh McGlynn distributes a very wide range of test and measurement equipment and describes his business aptly as ‘science for industry’. The five cent products belong to another major element of the business in supplying disposable sterile containers for test samples.
Import and export
In fact it was with the import and distribution of specialised sterile sample containers, quite unique at the time, that Daragh McGlynn started his business in 1992 in Sandyford, Co. Dublin. A short time later he added instrumentation, introducing a specialised product to test for antibiotic residues in milk. That is still the business mix, with test and measurement devices and monitoring systems on the hardware side plus the disposable containers required by a range of sampling types. There is also a technical support and maintenance service since many of the instruments require regular servicing and calibration, with at least annual certification to strict technical standards and regulatory requirements
All about agri
The agri-sector is still a principal market for the company, including the various inspection services of the Department of Agriculture and Food. The Department of Health and the Food Safety Authority are also customers, illustrating the huge range of industrial microbiology fields in which testing and analysis is required by official inspectors and laboratories as well as commercial enterprises and professional practices. It also does a lot of business in Northern Ireland.
“We started with a single PC, a simple accounts program and word processing and I think that5 was about it,” Daragh McGlynn recalls. “We are still a small business, with five people and PCs plus the server, but our requirements have grown much more complex. That is why we made the move to Sage MMS last year, a sophisticated finance and trading suite with the levels of stock control and complete traceability of every item that we needed. It is fully integrated, so for example stock is automatically updated through the sales and purchase order processing routines. Importantly, it also provides for advances we wanted to make, like emailing invoices, statement and purchase orders.”
The company has about 250 active customers and a product range of over 500 lines from five major manufacturers. A sizeable proportion of those customers have monthly standing orders for test sample containers and other disposable supplies. “We have in fact outsourced the warehousing and logistics function completely to Exel. We rent warehouse space from them and they pick and ship our orders throughout Ireland, which currently amounts to over 3,000 deliveries a year.”
Excel (lent) communications
Communications with Exel are by e-mail but utilising the Sage MMS capabilities to fill in customer order numbers, product codes and part numbers, etc. “Because so many of our customers are in tightly regulated sectors such as healthcare and food industries, we need to ensure complete traceability of all sterile disposables. The Sage MMS system enables us to do that comprehensively to any required audit standards by recording all batch numbers and relating them to the manufacturers’ or shippers’ original bar codes. It also, of course, tracks all equipment by serial number, which can be important in relation to service and calibration records.”
Unfulfilled orders
Another feature that has proven valuable is that the system tracks ‘orders not fulfilled.’ This can be very important in Daragh McGlynn’s business, where a big customer may issue orders for a number of items plus its monthly standing requirements. If one item is temporarily out of stock and the balance is despatched, it can be very difficult to keep track of the missing item afterwards and then fulfil the order later when it comes into stock without a smart system to remember the missing item and then raise an alert. In a similar way, the system keeps track of items that have been sent to customers for evaluation and so are neither in stock nor sold.
Temperature checks
In the last couple of years Daragh McGlynn has been developing another arm of the business based on the need to monitor and record temperatures, for example in food supply chains. The equipment ranges from passive min/max ‘tell tales’ for pallets or containers to chill loggers that keep an auditable record of temperature changes. Remote monitoring is a key growth area. “Monitoring today can be over the Web, with access to data any time, anywhere from monitoring instruments that use GSM telecommunications to upload information,” he explains.
“These are state of the art solutions from Invisible Systems, a leading UK company that we represent in this market. This is an increasingly important regulated area across the food sector. From producer to transport company to supermarket cold store, companies need the tools to monitor and record. When an unacceptable deviation occurs or is threatened, the ability to raise the alert is crucial. At the least, the value of goods will be lost if they become unsaleable. So we offer systems that can alert management or technicians by email or text message.” The company offers similar telemetry systems for remote monitoring of gas pressures, for example, or the consumption of liquids or other materials in storage tanks.
“We are in a growing but highly competitive niche market,” Daragh McGlynn says. “But we serve sectors that are highly regulated and require smart test and monitoring systems to the highest current standards. As a business, we need similarly smart systems to serve our customers well and remain profitable.”
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