Ceylon2World (C2W): Empowering Agri-SME owners to discover lucrative export markets and navigate the exportation journey

Abstract

"Sri Lanka is developing nation, heavily relies on its Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector SME sector, which accounts for 75% of the total enterprises in Sri Lanka. Agri-SMEs, comprising over 75% of all SMEs in Sri Lanka, play a crucial role in the national economy. However, despite the Sri Lankan policy standards framework developed to foster the SME sector development, majority of SME ventures that start within Sri Lanka are closed down after three years of commencement and 60% of them occur within first two years. Given the circumstances of the situation it is clear that necessity for solution to address this issue. Through a comprehensive literature review, key challenges faced by SMEs during internationalization were identified. These challenges encompass lack of capital, insufficient infrastructure, lack of innovation and market information, higher competition, obsolete technology and managerial skills. Exporters and domain expert’s questionnaire were further employed to validate these findings and gather insights. Apart from the initial challenges users mentioned challenges such as finding new markets and new market opportunities were identified. Also, users mentioned that export becomes more risky due to lack of structured system to make transaction with buyers and information to identify safe shipping routes including risks and opportunities involved. Based on above data system requirement application was created to build a business intelligence application to provide exporters with required information to make effective decisions while facilitating environment to build healthy relationships with other buyers and exporters. The incremental and iterative approach was employed to build the final prototype of “C2W”. Final solution consists of all the core functionalities and the basic structure to implement the escrow system. Furthermore, underlying infrastructure is developed to scale the final solution serve the target audience with growing data needs. Finally, solution was evaluated by subject matter experts and technical expert based on concept and design to ensure the reliability, accessibility and the security of the final solution."