Siza

Ethical and environmentally sustainable platform.

Type
Web Application Development
Sectors
Sustainability, Environment, Farming, eCommerce, SAAS
Technologies
Code Igniter, PHP, MySQL, HTML5, CSS, Javascript, jQuery

Using tech to promote ethical and environmentally sustainable trade

SIZA, the Sustainability Initiative of South Africa, provides a platform for agricultural stakeholders to ensure ethical and environmentally sustainable trade, within the fruit growing industry. The platform aims to give visibility throughout the value chain to retailers, importers and exporters on their suppliers (growers).

Elemental were appointed as the web development company to design the architecture and build the platform, which would ultimately serve as the tech that drives the entire SIZA program.

The platform would be used by multiple stakeholders, each having their own sets of permissions and functionality. These stakeholders include: growers/farmers, pack houses, importers, exporters, retailers, auditors and SIZA administrators.

Subscription based eCommerce platform

The platform was created as a subscription based service, where each member would be able to register and renew their membership. Online eCommerce functionality facilitated instant payments.

A major feature was an in-depth Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) that growers had to complete. The SAQ had to work online and offline, due to the lack of Internet connectivity.

Upon completion and approval of the SAQ, auditors were scheduled to visit the farm(s) and ensure that the data was accurate and any other points of concern (corrective actions) documented, together with photo evidence. A specific online / offline capturing syncing module was built within the platform to allow auditors to work without Internet connectivity.

Growers had time to resolve any corrective actions and report back on these improvements within given dates. An audit certificate was generated and graded the farm according to the answers provided and other factors, which would be visible to other stakeholders in the supply chain.

A multitude of complex features to enable stakeholders

The platform comprises of loads of automation, triggers and notifications, based off certain actions, events that trigger and exceptions. Ensuring all stakeholders are notified when needed about critical items related to the ethical and environmentally sustainable production of fruit.

A huge amount of data is captured within the platform, so we developed a reporting engine that would generate various reports to aggregate and simplify the data into easy to understand information.

Data exporting tools exist to allow this complex data to be exported and further manipulated and analysed.

A versatile profile requesting and sharing mechanism was developed into the platform to allow various members of the supply chain to request and gain access to other members and view the data and reports about their fruit production.

In summary the platform was jam packed with a multitude of complex features enabling many different user types to capture, share and reporting on various data relating to the ethical and sustainable growing of fruit.

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INTERESTING FACTS

The SIZA platform was enhanced to integrate with another international industry specific platform called Global Gap.

We developed various pieces of functionality to ensure the two systems communicate seemlessly, meaning that the Global Gap platform is up to date with all SIZA related information based on the activities of their members.

WE LOVE A GOOD CHALLENGE

The platform was custom designed and developed to allow both the SAQs and the Audits to be done online and offline. A big challenge we faced was the amount of data and images that were being uploaded by the auditors when completing an audit. Several tests and simulations were conducted and many improvements were to the offline capability to ensure a perfect working system.

Coupled with this, web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox are constantly evolving and giving developers more power and access to features to allow us to do more in our web applications. This also contributed to the evolution of the offline functionality.