Summary
With the rise in coffee consumption across the world, more and more farmers are choosing coffee beans as their crop of choice. However, coffee farming has a large risk profile with a myriad of environmental and sustainable variables that must be considered and suppliers are also looking to source supplies from proven socially responsible farmers. All in all, coffee is a tricky crop… and this is where SCAPA comes in.
SCAPA is a free tool used by growers to collect and collate information on their crop and report risk, return on investment, sustainability and social responsibility ratings back to the grower. The data is also collected and made available to suppliers, roasters and distributors, allowing them to determine new sources of coffee beans that meet their requirements.
Features
- App downloadable from Google Play Store and Apple App Store
- Works on most phone and tablet operating systems
- Multilingual application – currently deployed in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Portuguese languages
- Does not require Internet connectivity to continue to work after being first downloaded. This is extremely important as most farms have little or no internet connectivity.
- Ability for multiple farmers to use the one device. Mobile phones may be shared by many users in small farming communities
- Ability to secure information through password-protected accounts
- Collect and collate data through a series of data entry screens
- Calculate and display a report showing return on investment and social, environment and sustainable ratings
- Upload data to the cloud servers when internet connectivity is detected.
Client
Name: SCAPA
Website: scapa.com.au
Industry: Farming
Location: Australia
Details
With the rise of coffee consumption around the world, many new coffee growers with little or no farming experience are lured into farming as a lucrative source of income in third world countries. A large proportion of farms quickly fail and this makes it difficult for coffee suppliers to source consistent supplies of coffee beans.
SCAPA tries to address this by providing the farmer with a valuable tool for calculating a farm’s return on investment so that the grower can determine early whether the farm will make money. SCAPA also reports and encourages socially responsible farming by prompting the grower for waste reduction and reuse data.
The real power of SCAPA though is the ability to collate data from the farmers and present that data to the suppliers. Suppliers can see which varieties of coffee beans are being grown in which areas and determine how risky the farming practices in the area are, helping the supplier to locate new and viable sources.
After the client had failed to see progress with a previous developer, Aktura Technology was engaged to develop the SCAPA application including iOS and Android versions and back-end database for data collection and collation.
The client had limited computing experience and as such, we held a series of workshops with the client to help determine the functionality required by the application. We also gave the client access to several of our internal tools to speed up communications and provide “early access” to releases so that they could comment on progress in near real-time.
Our role included:
- UX and UI design
- Application functional design based on customer expectations
- Database and schema design and implementation
- API design and implementation
- iOS application development, approval and deployment
- Android application development and deployment
Feedback
Screenshots
Technology
- Ruby on Rails back-end integrated with a Postgres database
- JSON API
- Ionic/Angular 5 front end
- Natively compiled iOS and Android applications
Challenges
- Must work offline as Internet connectivity is poor in many rural farming communities
- Must work on all devices – iPhone, Android, tablets, phones etc
- Simultaneous release on all device types
- Must be multilingual with the initial release in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Portuguese languages.