Livestock Management for web and mobile

The challenge

Our client runs a cattle operation in the United States that buys calves, raises them on several ranch sites and ships them on. Every animal carries an RFID ear tag that stays with it for life. The client's older system and its handheld reader were reaching the end of their life, so the records had to move to a new platform without losing any animal's history: where it was born, where it is now and where it is going, its status (received, dead, culled, pre-shipping, sold, shipped), its lot and owner, and the key dates. Most of the work happens at the chute and the loading dock, not at a desk. When hundreds of calves pass through, nobody can update records one by one, so every action had to work in batches: set the values once, scan the tags, and each scanned animal gets the same update. Some shipments need a manifest listing every tag before the truck leaves. At loading, the handheld had to confirm each animal on the spot, much like tickets scanned at a stadium gate, and at the end show which listed animals had not been loaded.