UT Grain Management, together with its Oracle implementation partner, APPSolve, has won a 2016 Oracle Sustainability Innovation Award for the Farmer Database Management System (FMS).
This award recognises the innovative use of Oracle technology to address global sustainability business challenges. The winning customers reduced their environmental footprint while also reducing costs using green business practices and Oracle technology.
This is the second consecutive year that APPSolve has won the award. Last year, USAID Trade Hub and APPSolve were presented an Oracle Sustainability Innovation Award for their deployment of a Warehouse Receipt System (WRS) into several southern African countries. Both systems form part of APPSolve's AfricaTradeApp portal.
The FMS is flexible and scalable and makes it possible to provide business intelligent information to support investment decisions. In order to demonstrate the direct impact that the Oracle software has on creating wealth and improving living standards in Mozambique, Maureen Grosvenor, APPSolve's Chief Strategy Officer, explains: "The Mozambican currency (Metical) has over the last year been one of the worst performing currencies in the world. Although Mozambican agricultural commodities are priced in local currency, they are mostly derived from US$. Registering on the database, and thereafter receiving training and bank accounts, is the only hope for farmers to protect their wealth (mostly vested in the products they produce) and their living standards. The FMS allows investors to identify where the greatest return on their investment will be. As the volumes grow, we envisage the need to procure Oracle Database Enterprise licences."
Dr Andr'e van der Vyver, Director of UT Grain Management, outlines his company's key objective: "The key objective of UT Grain Management is the execution of projects in southern Africa, finding solutions to the issues of food security and adequate production in the region, as well as to facilitate trade, thereby increasing international competitiveness, intraregional trade and food security. UT Grain Management has a history of successful participation in development projects. For example, in Malawi (2012-2013 - the implementation of marketing systems through ACE, the Agricultural Commodity Exchange for Malawi); and in Zambia (2013-2014, the relaunch of Zamace, the Zambian Agricultural Commodity Exchange)."
Development projects are common in southern Africa and can span years. New projects have a tendency to build on the foundation of work completed in previous projects. Therefore, it is imperative that project data, based on the communities, education, health, economic and crop activities involved, can be utilised in subsequent related projects. To date, adequate information was not readily available and therefore risks could not be mitigated and the investments could not be given a high probability of success. Due to the inherent technology challenges in Africa, electronic record-keeping is a distinct business challenge. A flexible easy-to-implement and user-friendly information capturing and analytic tool was required.
APPSolve developed the Web-based FMS, which provides a solution to capture and integrate these projects' data, as well as built-in analytical and extraction tools. The FMS also provides information dashboards to make informed decisions about future projects. Better decision-making will realise a better chance of success, and in turn this will lead to a better utilisation of effort and funds. Oracle Application Express and Oracle Database XE technologies were used.
"We are inspired by the important work and great success achieved by Oracle customers committed to a sustainable future," said Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer and Group Vice-President of Product Strategy, Oracle. "UT Grain Management and APPSolve implemented Oracle technologies in a way that improved business efficiencies, reduced costs, and ultimately supported their eco-transformation. We are honoured to award both organisations with a 2016 Oracle Sustainability Innovation Award."
APPSolve's ability to take business requirements and convert them into pragmatic solutions within a very short time-frame ensures the technology investment is kept to a minimum, while the returns and benefits far outweigh the costs. The quick agile deployment of this solution was fast, spanning just under four months, keeping bandwidth to a minimum, and the training requirement was not onerous. Mozambique has been targeted for the initial roll-out. This country is known to be one of the poorest countries in the world based on World Bank research published.
One of the core benefits of the FMS is to ensure that every investment made in Mozambique yields the greatest return on investment. In future phases, the system will be enhanced to build onto this core data so that an extensive agricultural database for Africa per country and as a whole will be established.
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