John Keells innovates electronic tea auction system with Mobitel

Friday, 8 February 2013 01:20 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

John Keells PLC, the tea and rubber broking arm of John Keells Holdings, recently conceptualised, initiated and deployed e-Gavel, a tablet-based application developed and serviced by Sri Lanka Telecom Mobitel, for the purpose of capturing tea auction information in real-time.

The eGavel design and domain knowledge – to capture both buyer as well as the price information, at the speed of the tea auction – was provided by John Keells PLC who has extensive knowledge of and experience in the tea industry.

Over the past 140 years, the tea industry in Sri Lanka has functioned with the current manual data capture, processing, and dissemination of information and tea auctioning process, where details such as the hammer price and buyers are all recorded manually at the speed of each auction. This data is then keyed into a software system which then verifies the deals with the buyers to ensure no errors are made.

The eGavel application, conceptualised and initiated by John Keells PLC, is just one of many innovative business solutions developed together with Mobitel, who has designed a number of such solutions for corporates across the island, in a bid to enhance their product and service offering, thus providing their customers with solutions to increase productivity and efficiency via the latest ICT tools.

Speaking at this ground breaking launch, John Keells PLC CEO Sudath Munasinghe observed: “I believe this is yet another instance where John Keells PLC has played the role of a trendsetter in the hallowed tea industry of Sri Lanka. The process of recording each and every transaction at the tea auction is a daunting task, especially since it is done manually. It takes only a few seconds for a lot of tea to be sold – and all price recordings need to be carried out in such a short timeframe and thereafter keyed in manually, whilst verifying all the data for accuracy at the close of each auction. The new application, developed by us together with Mobitel, helps not only to address the task of direct sale information capturing, but also uploading of data to our back-end systems simultaneously, error-free.”

Mobitel’s CEO, Lalith De Silva said: “As Sri Lanka’s National Mobile Service Provider, we are committed to offer the ‘best-of-breed’ solutions and services to our valued business partners. The eGavel application will serve one of the most prestigious industries in the country, and it is certainly an honour for Mobitel to launch this initiative together with John Keells PLC. As the next phase of this initiative, we are also working on extending this system to share data between tea buyers and sellers. I strongly believe that tailor-made solutions such as this would help and enhance the productivity of our business partners to create a competitive advantage and to be in the forefront of the industry.”