Online Tea Auction System

Abstract

Tea production plays a momentous role in the Sri Lankan economy. Tea industry has been contributing a vital amount to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and government revenue earnings over the past years. It is the highest income generating product when compared to other agricultural products. Therefore, it is essential to strengthen the tea supply chain in the country to get the maximum output of the product. In Sri Lanka, similar to other major tea producing countries, tea is mainly sold in an auction. In the entire tea supply-chain, the weekly tea auction plays a vital role. Tea auction involves different parties including tea plantations, tea brokers, buyers and tea board. Tea auction process has been carrying out manually for a long duration and have faced various challenges throughout. Therefore, there is a need in optimizing the tea auction process due to various uncertainties faced by all parties involved. For a long period of time the online tea auction concept was on hold in Sri Lanka due to fear of losing the existing physical bidding. Then starting from 2013 several attempts were taken to automate the auction but none of the attempts continued to be a long-term success. However, due to curfew situation in the country following Covid-19 pandemic, the Colombo tea auction was held online in April 2020 for the first time in history. Though, the digital system moved on a slower phase than the manual out-cry system, it had ended successfully. Therefore, now the authorities are looking forward to continuing the electronic platform with further developments and value additions. While the situation within Sri Lanka is as above, India has been successfully using this concept for some time now. Moreover, this concept has been actively spoken in Kenya and many prototypes have been developed to achieve it. This project is another attempt taken towards bringing the online tea auction concept alive in Sri Lanka. Here, an electronic system is introduced to automate the existing tea auction process that has been operating for prolonged period in the country. This system connects all parties involved in tea auction process namely, tea warehouse, broker, buyer, and tea board with a common database. All the processes currently carried out by each party manually, such as invoice adding in tea warehouse, tea valuation and catalogue preparation by broker, tea valuation by buyer, holding the tea auction and analysing results after a tea auction are automated with some value additions. A new way of holding tea auctions electronically incorporating a gaming concept is also introduced in the new system. Furthermore, the new system provides lively updating dashboards to each party, letting them evaluate their performance real time and take decisions accordingly. Online tea auction system was designed researching and analysing a significant number of literature as well as a wider range of industrial survey. The prototype was built using various software development tools including modern BI tools. This solution was evaluated by all the related parties and highly rated in terms of novelty and coverage.