Sustainable Agriculture Mobile Commerce (SamCom) - Extending the rural grocery supply chain through M-Commerce

Despite the popularity of integrated grocery supply chain management as a research area for both academic and industry researchers, little work has yet been undertaken on how to link primary producers into the chain. In this paper we provide an introduction to SamCom (a joint university/ industry project), which will investigate the feasibility of using mobile phones to capture and transmit supply chain food product information from primary producers to the next link in the supply chain: supermarkets, restaurants, or export partners. The project will focus on the sustainable agriculture sector and will comprise two sub-projects: an investigation of the acceptability and use of M-commerce by primary producers themselves; and a technical investigation of the techniques needed to capture and transmit food produce data using mobile phones from remote and rural areas. The paper provides an overall description of the project, briefly covering the existing grocery supply chain literature, then describes the project's aims (generally, and in terms of the two sub-projects) and finally considers the potential contributions a successful outcome might have to offer.

[1]  Paula M. C. Swatman,et al.  The Potentialities of Focus Groups in e-Business Research: Theory Validation , 2002, E-Business: Multidisciplinary Research and Practice.

[2]  Tony Dunn,et al.  Rapid Rural Appraisal: A description of the methodology and its application in teaching and research at Charles Sturt University , 1994 .

[3]  D. Morgan.  Focus groups as qualitative research / by Morgan, David L. , 1988 .

[4]  M. Gribaudo,et al.  2002 , 2001, Cell and Tissue Research.

[5]  Jan Holmström,et al.  Viewpoint: reaching the consumer through e‐grocery VMI , 2000 .

[6]  A. Kroeger,et al.  Health interview surveys in developing countries: a review of the methods and results. , 1983, International journal of epidemiology.

[7]  George Roussos,et al.  Designing appliances for mobile commerce and retailtainment , 2003, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[8]  Abdelsalam Helal,et al.  iGrocer: a ubiquitous and pervasive smart grocery shopping system , 2003, SAC '03.

[9]  Roy Want,et al.  Bridging physical and virtual worlds with electronic tags , 1999, CHI '99.

[10]  George M. Giaglis,et al.  Systems architecture for pervasive retail , 2003, SAC '03.

[11]  Biswanath Mukherjee,et al.  Traffic engineering in multigranularity heterogeneous optical WDM mesh networks through dynamic traffic grooming , 2003, IEEE Netw..

[12]  Denis Rouffet,et al.  High speed internet in sparsely populated areas , 2004 .

[13]  Panos E. Kourouthanassis.  Grocery Supply-Chain Management : MyGROCER innovative business and technology framework , 2001 .

[14]  George M. Giaglis,et al.  A case study in pervasive retail , 2002, WMC '02.

[15]  Kay Römer,et al.  Infrastructure Concepts for Tag-Based Ubiquitous Computing Applications , 2002 .

[16]  Paola Inverardi,et al.  Infoparco: an experience in designing an information system accessible through WEB and WAP interfaces , 2001, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[17]  I. M. Crawford.  Marketing Research and Information Systems , 1997 .