A livestock agency and abattoir loses money in the gaps between systems, not inside them. This is what the thirteen Orbit applications do across one operation — farm gate, sale pen, kill floor, cold room, butchery — when the animal keeps a single identity the whole way through.
A composite drawn from how livestock agencies and red-meat abattoirs actually run in South Africa. Substitute your own figures anywhere — the structure is what carries across.
| Part of the business | What it does | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Livestock agency | Weekly auctions at two sale pens; commission on the hammer priceAbout 350 registered consignors and 600 registered buyers on the book | 1 200 headlotted per sale day |
| Abattoir | Cattle and sheep lines, lairage, classification, chillers22 slaughter days a month | 120 + 600head per day |
| Deboning & cold store | Primals, boxed beef, vac-pack, blast and holding chillers | 634 tcarcass mass / month |
| Distribution | Own fleet into independent butcheries and two retail DCs | 6 vehiclesabout 40 delivery points |
| People | 11 office, 40 slaughter and deboning floor, 6 drivers, 5 gate and security | 62headcount |
Nobody in this business is careless. The losses are structural: at every handover the animal is re-identified by hand into the next system, and every re-identification is a place where a number can be wrong and nobody will know for a week.
A tally on a loading note, written in a bakkie in the dark. Head count, no individual identity.
A lot number in a spreadsheet, typed up by the sale clerk from that loading note.
A pen tally at intake. A short load or a mortality in transit surfaces days later, if at all.
A hook number chalked on the carcass. Mass and classification go on a clipboard and are typed up after shift.
A label on a box. The link back to the farm that supplied it is a date and a hand-written batch number.
An invoice line, keyed for a third time. The seller's settlement is reconciled by hand against the sale sheet.
Not the licence fees. It costs a reconciliation clerk, disputed weights with farmers who are also your suppliers, shrinkage discovered at month-end rather than at the race, commission billed off a spreadsheet, and a recall enquiry that takes two people two days in a room of lever-arch files.
Every one of those is a gap between systems, not a fault inside one. Buying a better accounting package does not close a single one of them.
A UHF ear tag is applied at first contact — on the farm, at the sale pen race or at abattoir intake — and read by machine at every handover after it. The tag is the key everything else hangs off.
A driver runs a collection route across three or four farms, and loading happens at first light. The consignor signs a loading note; the office sees it when the driver gets back, if the paper survives the trip.
The identification mark, the removal permit and the stock-theft clearance are all paper — all issued at the farm, and all needed again at intake.
Relay plans the route and puts the run on the driver's phone. Each farm is a stop with an expected count, and loading is confirmed at the stop rather than from memory in the yard three hours later.
The driver photographs the permit and the clearance into Vault against that consignment, and tags applied at loading are read into TAG on the handheld — so the consignment leaves the farm as a list of individual animals rather than a number.
The catalogue goes out by email on Tuesday. Buyers arrive on Thursday, queue at a trestle table, write their details in a book and are handed a numbered card. Somebody has to remember which buyers are over their credit limit.
Lots are weighed at the race, knocked down and written on a sale sheet. Buyer invoices and seller settlements are typed up afterwards.
An auction is an event, and Core already runs events. Buyers pre-register from the catalogue link, check in by scan on the day, and are issued a buyer number at the desk. Walk-ins are registered in under a minute and arrival numbers are live.
Beacon sends the catalogue segmented by province and reports who opened it — which is next week's call list. Ephoro reads driver's licences and vehicle discs at the yard gate. Ledger raises the buyer invoice and the seller settlement, net of commission, off one set of books. The desk tablets are locked to the check-in app by Cipher, so a device handed to a casual at the gate cannot become somebody's personal phone for the afternoon.
The truck reports to the gate and somebody counts heads off the ramp into the lairage pens. Permits are checked against a delivery note.
Mortalities and short loads become an argument later, because there is no record of what actually came off the truck.
Ephoro takes the driver and vehicle at the gate in seconds — licence barcode and disc, not a book. TAG reads the whole load as it walks the unloading race through a fixed portal: a UHF reader handles hundreds of tags a second, so a full truck reconciles against the loading list before the driver has pulled off.
A discrepancy raises itself at the race, while the driver is still there. Permits and health declarations land in Vault filed against the consignment, which is where an inspector will ask for them.
Hot carcass mass is read off the scale and written down, the classifier assigns an age and fat code, and condemnations are noted. All of it is typed up after the shift against a hook number that has already been reused.
The ammonia plant, the chillers, the stunner and the saws are maintained on a phone call and a whiteboard. Labour cost per head is a month-end number.
TAG carries the identity onto the rail, so mass, classification and any condemnation attach to the animal that came off a named farm — the kill sheet the consignor receives is generated, not typed.
Pulse clocks the floor, so labour cost per head is a daily number and overtime is visible before payroll closes. Orion holds the plant: every chiller, compressor, stunner and saw as an asset with its own service history and statutory checks. Flux holds custody of what people carry — scales, probes, knives, handhelds — against a named person, with calibration dates.
Carcasses hang, get cut into primals, boxed and labelled. Stocktaking a cold store means shutting it and counting, usually over a weekend.
Yield from live mass to saleable kilograms is estimated rather than measured.
Cartons are printed and encoded on the line, so a chiller is counted by walking it once with a handheld rather than closing it. Ledger values carcass and boxed stock at weighted-average cost with VAT handled per line, so yield stops being a guess.
Relay sequences the delivery run, takes proof of delivery on the doorstep, and gives the butchery a tracking link so they stop phoning to ask where the load is.
Farmers phone the office for kill sheets and settlements. Butcheries phone for statements and delivery times.
An audit or a recall enquiry becomes two people and two days in the file room.
Fuse is the consignor's own front door: consignment status, kill sheet, classification and settlement statement, without a phone call. Butcheries get the same door for orders, deliveries and statements.
Because one identity ran the length of the chain, “which butcheries received meat from that farm on the 14th” is a query rather than a paper hunt. Vault holds the permits, clearances and records behind it.
Thirteen applications behind one Orbit sign-in. Each sells standalone and each is licensed separately, so nothing here has to be bought at once.
One set of double-entry books carrying quotes, orders, invoices, credit notes, debtors, creditors, banking and stock. Stock is costed weighted-average and VAT is calculated per line.
Here: Buyer invoices and consignor settlements off the same ledger, commission as its own income line, and carcass and boxed stock properly valued.
UHF at 860–960 MHz. Fixed readers to 33 dBm read 500-plus tags a second at ranges to 20 m; the rugged Android handheld does the same plus 1D/2D barcode.
Here: The spine of the whole blueprint — ear tag, intake race portal, rail reader at classification, carton encoding, dispatch bay.
Reads the South African driver's licence barcode and the vehicle licence disc at the gate, so a person and a vehicle are signed in by scan in seconds.
Here: Every livestock truck, contractor and buyer's bakkie — with the permit and clearance numbers captured against the visit.
Registration pages, invitations, a check-in desk a scanner links to by QR, live arrival statistics, walk-in registration, an attendee app, programme and venue map.
Here: Sale day. The catalogue is the programme and the pen layout is the venue map.
A control tower plans and assigns runs on a live map; the driver's phone carries the run sheet, stop check-in and proof of delivery; customers get a public tracking page.
Here: Farm collection runs inbound and butchery delivery runs outbound, sequenced for cold chain.
Staff clock in from the app or a fixed point. The manager's roll call shows who is on site, who is late and what the week is costing.
Here: Slaughter and deboning shifts, so labour cost per head is a daily figure.
Carries a job from logged to invoiced: scheduling, labour and parts costed against that asset's own history, an SLA, and recurring tasks that raise themselves.
Here: The plant register — chillers, compressors, the ammonia plant, stunners, band saws and the weighbridge.
Customers log requests, follow progress and see their own sites, assets and contracts. What they log lands in Orion and Ledger rather than in somebody's inbox.
Here: The consignor's portal for kill sheets and settlements; the butchery's for orders and statements.
Contacts organised by company, industry and province. Mail built from blocks, sent cleanly and reported back on — who opened and who clicked.
Here: The sale catalogue by province, the weekly market report, and the settlement-is-ready note.
A personal drive for everyone and shared drives per team behind the same sign-in, with links you stay in control of and a restorable trash.
Here: Removal permits, stock-theft clearances, health declarations, grading sheets and calibration records — filed against the consignment.
Equipment booked out against a named person and a place, verified by barcode, with the audit trail kept.
Here: Scales, temperature probes, knives, PPE and the RFID handhelds — who holds it and when it was last calibrated.
Tags every vehicle on a yard so the whole yard is walked in one pass, and flags units that have been standing too long.
Here: The lightest fit of the thirteen, and worth saying so — it earns its place on a large sale pen or a fleet yard, not on a single site.
Built on Google's Android Management API. A device enrols by scanning a durable QR code and lands on the policy chosen for it — the apps it may run, the settings it may change, and kiosk mode if it should only ever do one job. From the console you can push an app, lock a handset somebody left behind, watch data usage, draw a geofence, and wipe a leaver's device.
Here: The layer under every device in this blueprint — the four RFID handhelds, the sale-day check-in tablets, the gate scanners and the drivers' phones. Kiosk mode means the desk tablet runs the check-in app and nothing else, and a handheld left in a lairage pen is locked from the office.
Orbit itself is the control plane underneath all thirteen: one sign-in, per-application entitlement, and per-user permissions down to section and action, so a gate guard, a floor supervisor and the financial manager see three different systems.
Indicative South African market ranges for the categories of software an operation this size is typically already paying for — not quotations, and not attributed to any named vendor.
| What they pay for today | Orbit application | Indicative today, per month |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-market accounting or ERP, about 15 users | Ledger | R6 000 – 14 000 |
| Standalone stock and weighbridge software | Ledger + TAG | R2 500 – 6 000 |
| Barcode and label software licences | Ledger + TAG | R1 200 – 3 000 |
| Clocking terminals and T&A software, 62 staff | Pulse | R1 800 – 4 500 |
| Visitor book, guard hours, printed gate stationery | Ephoro | R1 500 – 3 000 |
| Email campaign tool, about 5 000 contacts | Beacon | R900 – 2 500 |
| Cloud file storage, 20 seats | Vault | R2 000 – 4 000 |
| Delivery app or third-party proof of delivery | Relay | R1 500 – 4 000 |
| Sale-day registration or ticketing tool | Core | R1 200 – 3 500 |
| Maintenance and job-card software | Orion | R2 000 – 5 000 |
| Asset register on a spreadsheetNo licence fee. The cost is not knowing. | Flux | — |
| Consignor and customer portalAlmost nobody has one. The cost is the telephone. | Fuse | — |
| Mobile device management, ~12 handhelds and tabletsMost MDM licences carry a 25-device minimum, so a small estate pays for more than it uses. | Cipher | R400 – 1 500 |
| Software the operation already pays for | R21 000 – 51 000 |
Roughly R36 000 a month is currently being spent on ten systems that do not talk to each other, and the cost of them not talking is an order of magnitude larger than the fees. That gap, not the price of software, is what this blueprint is about.
Orbit is quoted per operation once the walkthrough is done, and the entry phase is deliberately scoped to sit inside what is already being spent. Either way, do not lead with cost — nobody re-platforms an abattoir to save on licences, and nobody should.
Close the money gap
Labour & delivery
Everything else
One set of books, the gate under control and identity on the animal. This is the phase that stops the arguments about what came off the truck and what was billed for it.
Orbit · Ledger · TAG · Ephoro · Cipher
Cost per head becomes daily rather than monthly, deliveries carry proof, and consignors stop phoning the office because they can see their own kill sheets.
Pulse · Relay · Fuse
Sale day, the plant register, the marketing list, the document room and equipment custody. The chain is unbroken end to end and the recall question has a one-minute answer.
Core · Orion · Beacon · Vault · Flux
This is a model, not a measured result from a client. Every assumption is on the page so it can be argued with — which is the point. Change any cell and the answer changes honestly.
| Where the money is | Assumption | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Yield and shrinkage, measured at lastLosses currently found at month-end are found at the race and on the rail | Recovering 0.25% of 633 600 kg of carcass mass at an illustrative R62/kgUse the week's actual carcass price. At 0.75% this line is R295 000. | R98 208 |
| Reconciliation admin releasedNot a retrenchment — the same people doing work that earns something | 1.5 full-time equivalents at R18 000 | R27 000 |
| Commission billed off record, not memoryAuction billing generated from the sale rather than typed after it | 0.5% of R2.88m monthly commission, at 4 800 head and 5% | R14 400 |
| Unrecovered floor timeStart and end of shift drift, visible daily instead of monthly | 15 minutes per person per day, 40 floor staff, 22 days, at R45/h | R9 900 |
| Modelled monthly benefit | Conservative end of every range above | R149 508 |
R149 508 a month is the size of the prize at the conservative end of every assumption — and at the upper end of the yield range it is close to double. Set it against the monthly and once-off figures quoted in your proposal. The line that dominates everything else is yield and shrinkage, which is exactly why the RFID layer, not the accounting layer, is the part of this blueprint worth arguing hardest for.
Note what is not claimed: no revenue growth, no headcount reduction, and no saving on the software licences themselves. Everything above comes from measuring things that are currently estimated.
Every one of these comes up in the room. Better to raise them first.
Orbit records the classification your classifier assigns and the decisions the inspector makes. It does not assign them, and it does not certify the plant. What it changes is that those records become retrievable in seconds instead of found in a file.
Read reliability depends on tag placement, wet and dirty conditions and the steel in the races. A walkthrough before quoting is the difference between a portal that reads a full load and one that reads most of it — which is why NBS quotes fixed-reader installation only after one.
Ledger runs one organisation per instance. A group that needs the agency and the abattoir kept as separate legal entities with separate books needs separate instances — supported and priced per tenant, but an architecture decision to take up front.
Tags are priced on volume, chip type and environment, and at this throughput they are a meaningful monthly line. They belong in cost of goods alongside ink and labels, not buried in the software number.
Android allows one enterprise mobility manager per device, and switching it is not a settings change — every handset and tablet has to be factory-reset and re-enrolled. Plan it as a scheduled exercise with the fleet in a room, not as a background migration. NBS has done exactly this moving its own fleet off Hexnode, which is why the line is in the plan rather than discovered in week three.
All thirteen applications behind one Orbit sign-in — click a planet to explore what each one does.
Access and yard management: licences and vehicle discs read at the gate in seconds.
Readers, antennas, gates, handhelds, printers and tags — the layer this blueprint stands on.
The same suite instrumenting the middle of a factory — goods-in, the line, quality, dispatch and recall.
The same suite across a road freight operator — the order, the depot, the road, the yard and the POD-to-cash cycle.
Implementation, integration and support, from the site survey through to go-live.
