Features and Functionality

Farmer management and traceability systems

• Effective for managing primary producers and farmers in numbers starting from hundreds, rising up to hundreds of thousands of participants. Systems can include complex supply-chains with intermediaries, depots, collection stations and post-harvest processing.
• Assists businesses in achieving or maintaining any high-level quality standard, such as Organic and Fairtrade standards, centralizing farmer management into a single shared, fully functional application. All product is followed through the supply chain in a fully traceable manner.
• Enables farmers to be monitored and managed, ensuring they follow recommended farming practices, can track and manage diverse complex data linked to specific standards such as Fairtrade Premium payments, management of organic seeds and seedlings, etc.

If your business buys from more than a few hundred farmer-suppliers you will need systems to keep track of their data. Staff need to be able to access up-to-date farmer-lists and keep track of all additions and changes to this list or to the status and activities of farmers. For Organic and Fairtrade standards you need to be able to link every batch of product purchased from farmers back through a traceability process to the farmer who produced it. Our systems greatly reduce the burden of these processes and allow it to be done in a flexible way that directly maps to your own monitoring process. This means the system can add value to the business, rather than just being an additional burden.

Our systems include the ability to manage Organic and non-Organic product, Fairtrade and non-Fairtrade materials together in one system and carefully segregate and manage traceability for it all.

A critical feature of our systems is the robustness of their data-storage and data-sharing. Some of our competitors use cloud-based data-storage. This means that systems only work where there is network, and network is often not present in remote areas meaning that their systems cannot function. Our systems store all data a staff-member needs on their device, allowing full use of the system anywhere, whatever the state of the network. Our systems are designed to work on relatively basic Windows-compatible laptops, PCs and tablet computers, meaning that users have great flexibility in how they manage and enter data.

Our systems have been "destruction tested" with decades of operation in Africa and Asia. Low-level code has been written to minimize risks of data corruption and data loss. We are proud of the extremely high levels of performance achieved by our systems in relation to data integrity.

Enterprise data systems for Resource Management and supply-chain traceability

• Tracking raw material and input purchases and stock-holdings across multiple locations.
• Enables your business to have full supply-chain traceability. 
• Forecasting and requirement planning built in. Given budget-level production, the system will output purchase requirements and resulting storage requirements.

Data-systems like Orixa are given many names by software developers: Enterprise Resource Planning tools, Warehouse Management Systems, Customer Relationship Management systems.

Orixa aims to be a framework you can build into a system for your business, rather than a multi-purpose tool. If you have resource planning needs, or warehouse management needs, or quality testing and control systems Orixa can be used to build all or any of these systems with data structures bespoke to your individual business.

This does not mean your system will be designed from scratch. Most business problems share features, so systems built for previous businesses can be leveraged to use in your use-case.

Enterprise quality management systems, tracking issues and quality 

• Creation of systems for Managing product quality and conformity, registering tests and control points for different products and ingredients.
• Software guarantees product testing and compliance regimes are implemented effectively, for example batches of production cannot be released for sale before test results are logged into the system, if this is required. 
• System enables centralized data collection for non-conformancies, allowing management to analyse which processes and suppliers produce problems.
• Orixa includes flexible capability to add image records linked to production, product or quality-test related data for visual assessment.

Give staff clear digital systems for entry of data on quality testing for raw materials or finished batches of product. The systems allow your business to track and monitor the performance of suppliers, and ensure that all records related to compliance are easily and immediately available.

If raw materials require specific laboratory analysis as part of their legal requirements, tests can be built into the system to ensure that all batches of products using these raw materials are appropriately tested.

Keep records of all tests on hand and link individual tests to individual batches of production allowing certificates of compliance to be generated with the minimum of fuss.

Automation can be added if needed to undertake tasks diverse tasks which need to be undertaken for every batch of product. Automation greatly reduces the risk of human error. Examples of automation would include the generation of emails to suppliers requesting certificates of conformance for particular batches of product, if these have not been supplied, or the automated production of paperwork relating to laboratory or phytosanitary documentation to ensure this is produced correctly.

Factory production and process systems 

• Manage processing and production in your factory.
• Framework includes built in time-tabling and scheduling capability making the production time-table public and sharable.
• Systems can flag issues when production plans use excess quantities raw materials, work-force or factory machinery in excess of availability.

Time-table production of different batches of products in your factory to maximize the potential output. Colour-code products that include alergins so that production of these products can be scheduled together to minimize factory down-time.

Generate "shopping lists" for whole batches of complex products to ensure that all raw materials are on-hand in the factory prior to production. Generate "picking lists", "batch sheets" and all other paperwork required by your quality system. This paperwork can include any details drawn from your data, such as indications of the locations where each product is stored in the warehouse.

Keep track of the raw materials used in every production batch, enabling full traceability and product recall in the event of quality issues being identified.

If particular products require specialized expertise or equipment the system will keep track of this and inform floor-managers to make sure that they have the correct resources in place at the start of each production process. If particular production processes require specialized maintenance, scheduling of these can be automated, so that maintenance staff know where and when they need to do special tasks.

Farmer, and household monitoring and evaluation 

• Can include data on farmers, their household, assets, incomes and measure their engagement in training programmes, participatory development activities etc.
• Input data in carefully designed data-input screens that minimize invalid entries, and are easily used in the field.
• Import data from sources such as Excel, CSV and the web using carefully designed procedures which minimize invalid data and keep a audit trail of all data entry.
• Output data visually in user-friendly graphic formats and through reporting tools.
• Functional reporting for field staff such as: "Which farmers do I need to visit this week?"
• Management reporting for different management levels, such as "How many farmer trainings have been done this month?"

If you buy raw materials from thousands of farmers it is important to keep track of which groups or geographical areas are most productive, which groups have received training, or inputs. Our systems allow detailed analysis and reporting to be developed and displayed in user-controlled dashboards. If your project has goals such as numbers of farmers, measurable impacts such as increased farmer-incomes or livelihood improvements our systems can help with this monitoring process.

The systems are provided with full sets of reports and including listings, summaries, charts and "pivot tables". All reporting can be customized, adapted and developed by the user to meet there needs. 

All data in all systems comes with an audit trail so you can keep track of which staff members added, edited or removed particular pieces of data at specific times.

Model almost any complex relational data

• Built-in tools allow users to adapt and extend their own systems. Many aspects of your system can be adapted and developed using tools directly available within the system itself.
• Add your own custom reports, data-views, graphic dashboards and see these immediately become available across your business to all staff given access to them.
• Extend your data entities as your business changes through agile, incremental changes rather than massive, painful upgrades.

No business is fixed, the data requirements of any business adapt and change over time. Our systems allow users to customize systems and extend them so that the systems remain closely aligned with their needs. Users can extend existing data-entities, or add entirely new ones. All reports and dashboards can be extended and redefined by users. These are technical processes, and require levels of skill, expertize and training. If you wish to we can extend these systems for you, or we can find a third-party who can undertake the work. However with some training our systems become a flexible work-environment that can grow and change with your business.

Out goal is to provide a framework which businesses can extend and develop themselves, once the initial development is complete, and staff are trained to understand the extension process.

Manage practical processes such as wages and payroll

• Systems for computation of tax, national insurance, expenses and allowances.
• System can be built to cope with complex wage structures including weekly, hourly, piece-rate and salaried staff. Additional wage-elements such as expense-allowances, bonuses, loans and repayments to staff can all be included.
• Reduce the administrative burden of payroll management.
• Integrate directly with company accounts software such as Sage, Quickbooks or other packages.

Systems can be extended to provide technical solutions, the above example shows a business with more than 300 paid staff that uses our systems to automate generation of all wage and payroll data. The business includes monthly, weekly and piece-rate staff, with each grade of staff receiving wage payments through a different set of computations based on salary, weekly or daily wage rates and piece-rates for different types of work.

The system also includes capacity to manage a range of non-taxable expenses and payment of special one-time bonuses with a separate tax regime. Other software providers provide dedicated payroll solutions, but that means that your business has to adopt multiple software systems. Extending our systems with added modules minimizes training and data-entry and allows a small number of staff to manage complex data effectively.