About Glen Aine Foods

Glen Aine Foods is an Irish meat manufacturer based in Ballycahill, County Limerick, specialising in cooked ham and beef products. Producing around 45 tonnes of cooked meat weekly, the company supplies retail, foodservice, and manufacturing customers with hams, cooked beef, bacon, pulled pork, and diced meats.

The Challenge

Glen Aine Foods faced growing challenges in managing its production operations. With processes heavily reliant on paper-based systems and spreadsheets, the business struggled to achieve efficiency, accuracy, and visibility across key areas.

Cost control was difficult — tracking production costs was slow and resource-intensive due to fluctuating raw material prices. Throughput and cycle times were poorly understood, making it hard to optimise production. All traceability and quality records were paper-based, making analysis slow and error-prone. Yields were calculated in spreadsheets while inventory was manually tracked at the end of each day, limiting accuracy and responsiveness. There was no real visibility into consumption rates, supplier performance, or effective cost per kilogram of meat.

These challenges created bottlenecks across planning, manufacturing, and inventory management — ultimately restricting Glen Aine Foods' ability to scale operations and maintain profitability.

The Solution

Rubik Technologies partnered with Glen Aine Foods to design and implement a modern digital production system that replaced fragmented, paper-heavy workflows with a connected, operator-friendly digital infrastructure.

Using the low-code Bubble platform, Rubik built operator-centric apps tailored to each individual production operation. These apps allowed staff to capture data directly at the point of activity, digitising workflows, reducing paperwork, and ensuring information flowed seamlessly across the production floor.

Katana MRP was introduced to orchestrate planning and tracking of work orders and batch records. Katana provided a central hub for recipe management, stock control, production scheduling, and batch traceability — ensuring accuracy, compliance, and efficiency.

To give management real-time oversight, Rubik implemented a Power BI reporting platform that delivered insights into cycle times, cost of production, yields, inventory movements, supplier performance, and consumption rates.

The Results

The transformation delivered measurable benefits across Glen Aine Foods' operations. By eliminating manual paperwork and digitising core processes, the company significantly reduced administrative overhead and operational inefficiencies — achieving annual cost savings of over €100K with total savings projected at €150K annually.

Staff were able to focus on higher-value tasks, while managers gained real-time insights to monitor performance, optimise resources, and reduce waste. Glen Aine Foods gained new insights into supplier performance, meat yields, and effective cost per kilogram, enabling smarter purchasing decisions and improved profitability — delivering a 90% reduction in paper records and a 6.4× return on investment.