Roxan | Improving livestock identification

Who are Roxan?
Roxan has been providing innovative animal tagging solutions since 1998. In addition to ear tagging systems for sheep and cattle, Roxan also provide tagging solutions for poultry and game birds.
The Business Need
Building on their existing success in the farming market, Roxan wanted to introduce a new tag gun system that would make it easier for farmers to handle increasing legislative pressure to reliably identify their flocks.
Our Activities and Deliverables
Roxan approached 4c Design for support with the design of their new tag gun system. We carried out research into user requirements and worked with Roxan to decipher the applicable legislation. Our objective was to develop a design that would enable farmers with large flocks to tag each animal as easily and efficiently as possible. It was clear that a multi-tag system would be required since not only was Roxan targeting large sheep farmers, there were also legislative requirements for sheep to be tagged twice, once in each ear. We generated a number of design concepts which we quickly mocked-up and tested in our workshop. Our final design solution allows the user to load 20 tags into a magazine, fire a tag into the sheep’s ear then automatically load the next tag ready to fire. Animal welfare was an important consideration in our design process and we incorporated a ‘snap back’ jaw feature that prevents ear damage after tagging by quickly releasing the new tag.
The Result
Roxan put the TagFaster into production immediately and it was very well received by customers. The TagFaster also won Roxan a silver award for technical innovation from the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland.
Roxan was later bought out by Datamars. One of the international leaders in RFID for livestock.
Awards
Capabilities Utilised
- Concept development
- Industrial design
- User centred design
- Ergonomic development
- Mechanical engineering
- Prototyping
- Field trials
