SAP Rural Sourcing Management Overview

SAP Rural Sourcing Management is a mobile business application connecting smallholder farmers and suppliers in rural areas with the supply chain of global agribusinesses and consumer products companies. The Rural Sourcing Management mobile application is also utilized by plastic waste pickers and aggregators working within the circular economy to track volumes, types of plastics and prices paid for plastic waste across the value chain.

SAP Rural Sourcing Management is specifically designed to increase productivity and improve communities' livelihoods by providing full transparency on the supply chain and their participants and full traceability of agricultural products or plastic waste materials.

Developed on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, an in-memory Cloud platform based on open standards, the SAP Rural Sourcing Management solution provides access to a feature-rich, easy-to-use development environment in the Cloud. The platform includes a comprehensive set of services for integration, enterprise mobility, collaboration, and analytics.

The Rural Sourcing Management solution is comprised of a mobile application and a Web interface. It uses a Cloud-based server application as the central point of data consolidation and distribution to participating desktop and mobile clients over a lightweight synchronization mechanism.

The mobile application is designed for Android smart phones and is intended for use in the field. For agricultural products, the mobile application provides full electronic traceability from the earliest stage of individual smallholder farmer deliveries to the weighing bridge. For recycled plastic waste in the circular economy, it provides digital tracking and transparency about recycled plastic prices so plastic pickers can receive a fair price and avoid exploitation. The application is fully offline-enabled with full bandwidth optimization, allowing for transaction data management and data analytics in the field. With electronic data capture using the smart phones, the need for paper is virtually eliminated.

The Web Interface is a Cloud application that provides for comprehensive supply chain management. It is intended for use by management and Central Operations to monitor and maintain the various pieces of the master data as well as all transaction data.