Project Overview
VAPCOL(Vasundhara Agri-Horti Producer Company)has off late been facing the challenge of procurement of cashews from tribal farmers nurtured and promoted by BAIF and have setup cooperatives for processing and market linkages. But the farmers are getting exploited by local traders with unethical practices and getting low prices for their produce.To address the challenge SourceTrace and VAPCOL felt that digitization of farmers information would make understand harvest volumes to devise appropriate procurement strategies which would not only empower farmers and ensure traceability but also enable remote transactions such as procurement of the produce at the farmers doorstep using mobile phones.
Project Commissioner
Vasundhara Agri-Horti Producer Company Ltd
Project Creator
SourceTrace Systems India Pvt Ltd
Team
• SourceTrace Systems is a provider of customized application software solutions and real-time operating platforms to enterprises around the globe.
• Offices are located USA, India, Bangladesh and Costa Rica.
• Clients in India, Bangladesh, West Africa and Latin America.
• Full-fledged Development center in Coimbatore, India with 40+ programmers.
• Investors include leading Social Venture Capital firms such as Gray Ghost Ventures, Soros Economic Development Fund and Serious Change.
• Deep expertise in enterprise application development and Internet technology area for nearly 6 years.
• Strong leadership team with extensive experience delivering enterprise applications to large and mid-size enterprises globally leveraging offshore delivery model.
Project Brief
Despite the success of various sustainable development programs in breaking the vicious cycle of starvation malnutrition, migration of the tribal farmer’s, VAPCOL efforts to promote and coordinate procurement and marketing of farmers produce is still limited, largely because of high transaction costs, high levels of inefficiency and insufficient number of field staff to support procurement during the season. In order to extend the reach to the farmers and ensure sustainability of the development programmes, Farmers Producer organizations are considering the integration of new forms of information and communication technologies (ICT). Mobile Transaction Solutions enables agri enterprises to digitize the complete farmers information using mobile phones and also capture all transactions with the farmers at the field level so that the visibility, timeliness and accuracy of transactions are improved to benefit the management, offer new market knowledge, and also treat the farmer's fairly and equitably. The solution consist of mobile technologies for capturing field level transactions with the farmers and also movement of the produce within the value chain to improve the overall efficiency,visibility, transparency and accountability.
The objectives of this initiative was to create a centralized database of Farmer's data and increase controls to get real time information from Input Distribution, inventory, Procurement process, inventory of the produce, in transit, semi-finished and finished products, Preservation of identity of the produce to ensure traceability and Create a digital Internal Control System for Organic and fair trade certifications
Project Need
SourceTrace Systems eServices Everywhere™ (ESE™) platform sets the industry standard for remote data transaction systems with robust applications that have been deployed in low-bandwidth environments in three continents.
Designed for emerging markets with narrowband communications, ESE™ is optimized to use small data packets and wireless transactions to reduce costs and maximize speed.
The ESE ™ Remote application is designed for the most demanding environments with low bandwidth or even without a permanent connection, allowing certain transactions in online or offline modes. In online mode the transactions are sent in real time to the ESE™ Server and a response back is expected to happen immediately. In offline mode the transactions are processed remotely by the ESE™ Remote and sent to the ESE™ Server later when the connection is established. The ESE™ Remote application allows transactions in various remote devices like Smartphones, Tablets and POS-like devices as well as standard computers and laptops.
The ESE™ Server application is the transactional software in charge to set and manage the communications with ESE™ Remote application.
The ESE™ Server provides a Web interface for configuring and administering the ESE™ technology.
The ESE™ Server has a transactional engine responsible for receiving and responding to all transactional requests made by the remote devices
The ESE™ Adapter allows ESE™ platform to interface with multiple “Backend Systems”. Thus, ESE™ platform has the potential of unprecedented interconnectedness, as it allows integrating a wide variety of backend systems with different standards and technologies regardless of their size.
User Experience
SourceTrace Systems delivered the pilot solution to VAPCOL as a proof of concept to demonstrate the evidence of potential impact of the mobile solution at Dixal Cooperative before moving onto implementation across all the cooperatives. The software is offered as an enterprise service. The web application can be accessed on browser through internet. The mobile application is installed on the Android mobile device. The mobile application communicates to the server through data connectivity.
Deployment of Source Trace solutions enabled identity of every tribal farmer and access to information in real time by the management. The process ensured proactive planning and necessary interventions to enhance productivity, ensure traceability, manage risk and also provide a mechanism to monitor performance of farmers over diverse areas.
Farmer’s profiles were created, mapped, stored and retrieved at all times even at low bandwidth or offline mode.
The field staff selects the farmer on his mobile device and carries out the field transactions like input distribution, procurement, farm inspection, payment etc.
Information is communicated in real time to the server and management is aware of the operations and is on top of information about the project.
Receipts are printed in the field through Bluetooth printers and handed over to farmer for acknowledgement.
Proper training and training material was given to the end users.
Support was provided in the initials stages at the field level to get the users familiar with the application. Once they got familiar users were more productive than before.
Project Marketing
Effective information acquisition and management, starting at the source, is a critical step for organizations dealing large number of small holder farmers.
SourceTrace Systems software helps bringing in transparency, traceability and accuracy in their operations.
Mobile solution is a scalable and replicable business model across different geographic locations and requires support for customization and additional mobile hardware infrastructure.
Marketing strategy:
Enterprise software sales focused on customers working with vast numbers of smallholder farmers:
. Cooperatives and specialized agriculture-focused organizations
. Large agri-businesses and commodities processing firms
Revenue model is a traditional software Licensing model:
. Initial fees (license)
. Monthly recurring service fees (maintenance)
Sales model: Outbound sales, supplemented by inbound traffic capture.
Conversion from pilot to full implementation expected to track in the range of 70-80 percent.
In year 2015, targeting one customer close per business development resource per quarter totaling 30-40 customer closes
Expansion Plans
New Verticals
. Forestry Business (Timber Logging, Reforestration & Carbon Sequestration)
. Plantation Management (Palm, Banana & Rubber Plantations)
New geographies
. East Asia
. South America
New Software Products:
. Information & Data Analytics of farmers, farms and crop data
. Farmer advisory services & Crop information
Customers to include:
. Government policy makers
. Planning agencies
. Development organizations
. Commodity buyers
. Input producers, and
. Financial services providers
Project Privacy
SourceTrace Systems application has been provided as a SAAS model to the clients. The application is hosted and data is held at 3rd party data center which are competent with the highest standards in data security.
The software was designed, developed and deployed with secure features.
The website comes with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.
The SSL certificate serves as a digital "passport" allowing data to be transmitted over secure networks, protecting privacy of data. This provides authentication and encryption of data.
Regular data backup is taken and the backup is stored at a different site for security reasons.
User privileges and access controls are provided based on the user roles. Modification and Deletion can be restricted to users other than the Super users.
The web application and Mobile application verifies user credentials for login authentication.
The mobile devices used for data collection should be registered in the server application and should have the status as active to keep communicating with the server. Each time the information is received from the mobile device the server validates the device code and completes the transaction successfully.
Data is erased from the mobile database as soon as it has been successfully transmitted to the server. Log files are generated for communications received from mobile devices.
SourceTrace warrants special consideration for maintaining confidentiality. We educate the whole organization about the privacy policies and adherence continuously.
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