EBusiness Impacts on the Peanut Industry in Queensland
A Case Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600002555Keywords:
Business planning and strategising, innovative ideas, strategies and tools, Queensland peanut industry, e-businessAbstract
From a business perspective, the Dot.Com debacle of the late 1990s and early 2000s reinforced the need for good business planning and strategising, a clear requirement to be flexible and capable of almost constant change, a need to focus on creating added value and sustainable competitive advantage through the use of innovative ideas, strategies and tools – and finally, it focused attention on learning to harness the opportunities and minimise the problems associated with doing business in an electronic age. The case study outlined in this paper looks at the “What”, “Why” and “How” of doing business electronically in a traditional Queensland-based agri-industry – the Peanut Industry. The investigation found that the use of internet-enabled business practices between members of the industry value chain is increasing rapidly and is gaining respect as a means of improving efficiencies and productivity. It also found that if an entity in the value chain begins to do business electronically, other companies in that chain will need to follow suit or risk being substituted. In the longer term, it is likely that the drive for electronically enabled business practices will come from the larger food processing organisations, not only on the premise of improved internal efficiencies, but also because of increasingly tough food safety and quality assurance requirements that are prompting the need for real time quality information and decision support for product tracking back to source. Finally, conclusions are drawn for Smart State initiatives and for ‘smart’ practices in agri-business.
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