About Orixa
Data Systems for Global Farming Businesses
What is Orixa?
Orixa Systems Ltd. develop data systems for Global Farming Businesses that work with large numbers of small-farmer suppliers.
Orixa is a multi-user, multi-platform, software data-framework designed to work as a management information system for businesses in the food, agriculture, processing and manufacturing sectors.
Orixa is robust and reliable, able to work on basic hardware and designed to be used by users with relatively little training. It is designed to be agile, with the capacity to be upgraded and extended by local staff without expensive and complex interventions from software engineers.
The system can manage the data requirements of many businesses with complex supply-chains, multi-step manufacturing processes, food production, harvest, post-harvest, certification and processing.
Orixa is naturally a multi-user, multi-node system. Workers in multiple sites such as warehouses, factories, processing facilities, and external officers including inspection-staff, field-officers and sales-force members can share data and do so without permanent internet connection, through a powerful off-line data-synchronization model.
Orixa has been in development and active use for close to 20 years. Despite its age it is kept up-to-date through an active development process.
What can it do?
Orixa allows businesses to share data between staff members, teams and management easily. It automates and simplifies data-entry and busines process-management. It allows management to answer questions such as "which suppliers did we buy products from in March?" or "where did the raw materials come from for this particular product?" Orixa is used for supply-chain management, and production management by a range of businesses. Complex validation processes can be built in to systems to limit and validate data as it is entered, putting data mansgement in the hands of staff while safeguarding its accuracy.
Orixa is particularly powerful and important where a business works with a certification system or quality standard that makes complex demands, such as Organic, Fairtrade, EFSIS, ISO and BRC standards. In the food industry a certification standard may require that all batches of products using particular ingredients have specific tests or checks to cover off against risks of allergens. Orixa provides systems to ensure that your production process always matches your certification requirements. The systems generate quality procedures that give full traceability through your production process.
Orixa can manage locational geo-positioning data to give maps of positions of farmer-fields, and integrate with other line-of-business applications such as financial systems. All digital processes such as email, data-exchange, report generation and many others can be managed by Orixa. It is full-featured enterprise software designed for you to extend and develop.
Key Benefits
Own Your Data
Many management information systems manage your data for you. You access data through a web-portal, and data is stored by the software provider in the cloud. Anytime the software provider wishes to update their terms of use, change prices or alter their systems they can do so, and there is nothing you can do about it.
At Orixa we believe this model is fundamentally unfair. You own your data. Orixa systems store your data on your computers in a format which is open and transparent for you to access. You can import and export data into your Orixa system yourself. We cannot close your system off or deny you access to it.
All Orixa systems data is stored in a relational database. This is a technically complex data-store, with extremely powerful capabilities, but it is a commonly used international system and standard. If you need to move data on or change how you work Orixa cannot block you from doing so. You have the keys to open and use the database as you wish, and we can never deny you access.
Robust data management
A critical feature of Orixa systems is the robustness of their data-access, data-storage and data-sharing. Some of our competitors use cloud-based data-storage. This means that systems only work where there is a connection to the internet, and as this is unreliable in remote areas 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. Data is then updated on a "briefcase" basis, when a user has access to the network. Orixa 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.
Orixa systems have been "destruction tested" with decades of operation in Africa. Low-level code has been written to minimize risks of data corruption and data loss. We are proud of the extremely high levels of data integrity performance achieved by our systems.
Extensive Customization capability
No business is fixed, the data requirements of any business adapt and change over time. Orixa 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 data-entities with new linkages and relationships.
Complex customization capability has been built into Orixa at the ground level, allowing unparalleled ability to re-engineer systems that are in operation with relatively easy transformational steps.
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 your own staff can change and extend with your business.
Typical Users
Orixa Systems are already used by businesses in Africa, Asia and the UK. Originally developed for UK Fairtrade and Organic food manufacturer Fullwell Mill Ltd., in the 1990s, it was extended into use by Fullwell Mill's partner businesses in Asia and Africa. It has subsequently been extended as a data-framework for food manufacturing and sales businesses and further modularized as a general purpose relational and graphic database engine.
It has proven itself in Commodity Supply Chains such as coffee, cocoa, dried fruit and nuts, palm oil and vanilla. It has been used to manage BRC, Organic, Fairtrade, UTZ and Fair For Life certification of large groups of out-grower farmers as well as performing other key business functions. It has also been used to manage later stages of the supply chain from manufacture through to sales and marketing by other UK food businesses.
Orixa's ability to store and manage data about large numbers of participants with complex data needs has made it ideal for storage of data relating to NGO programmes targetting farmers and rural communities in Africa.
Orixa has also been used to manage base-line surveys and project data for different grant-projects and programmes, such as programs working with poor communities in rural Africa.