Scan-tastic: Orca’s whale of a business basks in success from Ukraine to US
Teams at 60 per cent of Fortune 500 companies – the largest in the US by revenue – and 40 per cent of FTSE 100 businesses in the UK use Orca Scan which in just seven years has grown its customer base to around 320,000 users worldwide.
Orca Scan is a cloud-based barcode tracking platform that simplifies enterprise-grade solutions without code. The venture was founded in 2016 and supported by Cambridge Judge Business School through the Accelerate Cambridge start-up programme, Barclays Eagle Labs Scale-up programme and Rising Women Leaders Programme at the University of Cambridge.
Orca boasts a fully remote global team with an HQ operating out of the new Allia Future Business Centre in central Cambridge. Its customer portfolio reads like a Who’s Who of global greats, including NASA – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration – an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space programme, aeronautics research and space discovery. NASA uses Orca Scan for inventory and vehicle tracking.
Car giant Toyota is another customer of the business, as are the NHS and Whirlpool Canada, which implemented Orca Scan to achieve inventory accountability. As a result, the Canadian company increased productivity by 400 per cent and cut costs by $200k a year.
Amazon – the world’s largest online retailer and technology provider – also uses Orca Scan for inventory management – as does Enfamil, the infant formula nutrition specialist which is part of the Reckitt Benckiser group.
Success for Orca Scan is not simply about making money. The company prides itself as having a heart as big as its customer catchment zone. A prime example is its role in a medical not-for-profit venture in war-ravaged Ukraine.
Rescue Now – delivering humanitarian aid in Ukraine – set up an entire drug tracking solution on Orca in a basement in Kharkiv for an inventory of 600 products, delivering to over 80,000 families.
It has made thousands of life-saving medical supply deliveries to people in need thanks to Orca Scan’s inventory management system. When donations arrive at the warehouse, they are scanned and sorted into dedicated boxes. Each type of medicine has a box labelled and stored in the warehouse.
Once scanned, helpers can see exactly how much of one product they have and where it is located in the warehouse. When someone requests a specific product, they can source it quickly by searching their ‘Orca Sheet.’
Orca Scan’s system also allows Rescue Now to track the expiration dates of the supplies, ensuring that volunteers are using effective products and can dispose of any expired ones. This not only saves resources but also helps to maintain a safe and hygienic environment.
Founder and CEO John Doherty is proud that the Orca Scan has grown organically from fairly humble roots. He has built the business on the back of 20-plus years of writing code for enterprise companies and the experience gained from building and developing two other technology ventures.
There is a twist in the early part of this particularly take: While building mobile prototypes for Cambridge University Assessment, John’s son Owen returned one evening from a work experience job tasked with manually recording the condition of hundreds of solar panels in fields across Cambridgeshire. He asked dad to build an app which could do the job in a fraction of the time! A star – in fact an entire galaxy – was born.
Now with a team of 20 there is no grass growing under feet at Orca Scan and certainly no laurels to rest on. That was demonstrated only this week when the company announced a new partnership with GS1 UK, the UK arm of a global not-for-profit association that sets and maintains standards for barcodes, to aid retailers and brands in replacing traditional barcodes on their product packaging with new GS1 Digital Link QR codes.
After 50 years, the traditional 1D barcodes will be phased out by 2027 and Orca Scan has become the first GS1-approved platform to fully integrate with GS1 – ensuring detailed product information is open and available to all supply chain systems.
GS1 Digital Link evolution will impact retail and supply chains as trillions of products will have a unique web page, editable in real-time.
Doherty said: “Our solution will eliminate consumers’ reliance on search engines for product information, eradicate the need for brands to send product details to retailers via spreadsheets, and negate the pre-reloading of databases with product data in Point of Sale and Warehouse Management Systems. We are excited to bring Orca Scan’s hyper-focus on simplicity to accelerate its adoption.”
• Orca Scan is a hot ticket in both the Disruptive Technology and Tech Scale-up of the Year categories of the recently launched Business Weekly Awards competition.
