UNIDO's ETRACE Project in Egypt (2004- )

Based on the new technology and the data collected from all 13 suppliers, and the information received from them regarding our requirements, we conducted a complete investigation to the submitted solution and study all the alternative in order to specify the best fit solution for our market.

Out of the 13 companies, 6 managed to display a very high technical and professional background and full understanding to our needs, as well as strong and easy to use solutions, with the appellate to extend forward or backward in the future to cover the remaining financial and operational process for any company in the produce manufacturing chain, with the promise to have a base office here in Egypt for future technical support for those that don’t have one in Egypt.

From the 6 companies, 3 have already established offices in Egypt or on the process of doing so, Muddy Boots, Total Control and Microsoft.

We asked the 6 companies to give a complete presentation for there application to have more understanding of its functionality which took place in England during my personal visit to U.K before the start of the consulting assignment and here in Egypt during the UNIDO project seminar on Traceability and Related Technologies on February 2006, this helped us to do our selection on the actual functions which we have seen in these applications.

5 companies committed to Arabize their application as soon as the have a concrete contract in the Egyptian market, the company number 6 is already in Arabic (MS Great Plain).

Out of the 6 companies only one is WEB based application, it was selected due to the fact that it can run in one company with many pack houses or many companies that will accept sharing their resources, this will reduce the cost of the solution and break it down between these users.

We excluded Great Plain based on the presentation they have give to us and the fact that they will need a lot of customization and modification on the application to fit the fresh produce market because the application is addressing other industries pharmaceutical and not the fresh produce industry. (The company was excluded)

We excluded Mike Dillon based on the fact that he could not provide us a quotation for our requirements without completing assessment of the Egyptian full supply chain that his soft ware will be addressing, this requires a visit to Egypt and the UNIDO has to pay for this visit, prior his ability to submit his offer for the fresh produce traceability software, therefore it was dropped out of the list.

Based on the 5 application requirements and the future extension of the application we standardized the hardware and software platform needed for the implementation, which will help on the volume of sales and reduce the price if we manage to allocate 3 hardware suppliers to take over this task.