DEVELOPMENT OF A SECURE INTEGRATED END-TO-END ELECTRONIC PROCUREMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR AGRO-BUSINESS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

This research work is based on developing a secure integrated end-to-end electronic procurement system for agro-business in Nigeria to reduce information asymmetry, make agro-business more profitable and attractive through lower transaction costs virtual market. A qualitative finding via structured questionnaire and direct one-on-one interview was carried out among farmers, farmers associations and agro input industries, and Microsoft Office Excel tool was used to analyze all the gathered data. Pinto and Slevin procurement management model was adapted to identify the critical variable of the procurement process and the system architecture was designed. A mathematical model of the system was carried out and Elliptic Curve System Digital Algorithm (ECSDA) security model was adapted to handle the security challenges of the system. Since the developed system is a web based; the client-side was implemented using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and JavaScript, while the server-side was implemented with Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) and the database management system used is MySQL. With respect to industry standards, Unified Modeling Language (UML) approach was used to capture the system requirements and its functionality level. The implementation was done on Intel processor core i3, 1TB Hard Disk and 8GB DDR2 RAM computer system; at the end both functional and performance tests were carried out on the system. The test showed that the system is capable of handling multiple simultaneous users with an average response time of 0.011 to 0.015 seconds.