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.

PROVIDING ACCURATE VEHICLE DATA TO USERS

You may or may not know but vehicles actually have a huge stack of information related to them. There are truckloads of makes and models that you've probably never even heard of (we were stunned when looking at the data).

In order to provide users with the best experience and the opportunity to make the best decision before enquiring about a vehicle, we want to present the user with as much accurate information about a specific vehicle as possible.

A substantial amount of data about a vehicle is received from dealers but there is also the risk that some of it may be incorrect or inconsistent, which could prove to be a problem to the savvy vehicle seeker.

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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.