Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
friendly, secure web-based market place. AgroGrid's focus lays on a complete
life cycle solution and ease of use makes its portal an efficient tool to manage
capacity offerings, negotiations, and actual capacity sourcing.
• Cost reduction: AgroGrid users benefit from significant cost reductions by
lowered transaction costs when using AgroGrid's market place. This means not
only cost reductions in capacity sourcing, but also in quality management, since
AgroGrid integrates tightly with GTNet®.
• Differentiation, less waste: AgroGrid users can better handle potential overca-
pacities or demand by trading even smaller, individualized quantities targeted at
specific market segments in AgroGrid. Individualisation helps to differentiate
from competitors, while smaller quantities help to reduce waste of perishable
food.
• Confidence: AgroGrid users are enabled to assure consumers of food products
high food quality and safety standards by means of GTNet®'s well known and
trusted tracking and traceability functionality and AgroGrid's SLA evaluation
reports.
11.4 Summary and Lessons Learnt
The purpose of the Business Experiment AgroGrid is reflected by the set of identi-
fied success criteria which include:
• Success criteria 1: to enable collaboration between companies throughout an
agricultural food supply chain,
• Success criteria 2: to leverage open value chain services and
• Success criteria 3: to implement trust-building and commercialisation support
mechanisms.
To do this, AgroGrid adopted the latest developments and implementations in the
field of Grid computing to the agricultural food industry in order to solve sector-
specific problems and prepare for future challenges. Furthermore, AgroGrid shows
that concepts borrowed from the field of Grid Computing can also be applied
to non-IT capacities like agricultural production or logistics. But AgroGrid
also deals with traditional Grid Computing scenarios - in particular with distributed
data storage and the sharing of tracking and tracing information for whole supply
chains.
11.4.1 Technical Experiences
Since AgroGrid was built partly based on existing components, a lot of effort was
put in integration and customisation work as well as in the building of a web-based
graphical user interface to access all components through a single web portal.
AgroGrid's users are able to interact with the whole system by using a standard web
browser. The interplay of all components was oriented to meet the structural charac-
teristics of the use case. For example, a Virtual Organisation in terms of AgroGrid is
not an unordered set of service providers, but rather a number of companies assigned
