ANALYSIS ON ICT USAGE OF HUNGARIAN FRUIT AND VEGETABLE PROCESSING ENTERPRISES Szilvia Botos, László Várallyai, Róbert Szilágyi,Gergely Ráthonyi, János Felföldi Institute of Applied Informatics and Logistics, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary

Introduction Food safety and quality are keys for survival of enterprises and great efforts and resources are devoted to them. Through the quick development of ICT, several new and innovative methods have been elaborated to help them in their internal and external business processes requiring high-quality ICT solutions. Fruit and vegetable preserving and processing sector is one of the main agro-food sectors in Hungary. Current article aims to determine the main ICT usage characteristics of this sector using data from own questionnaire besides secondary statistical data. This analysis may provide important information about this sector and possible measures for develop it.

Literature review Positive impacts of ICT on participants in supply chains and the operation of the whole supply chain have been emphasized in many publications analyzing different agro-food sectors. Viet et al. summarized the main conclusions of the literature – in total, 141 research papers were included – on the role of information in supply chains. Regarding supply chains good practices are proposed in many papers. Enterprises, in many cases, underestimate the potential offered by ICT, or cannot exploit them. Modimogale and Kroeze also highlight high cost of ICT as a hindering factor in usage for SMEs. Today, free cloud services offer good solutions for these barriers.

Literature review European Commission provides opportunity for ICT development for enterprises in several sector. The eFood Chain project, for instance, is one the measures to increase the efficiency of the agro-food supply chain and demonstrate the real benefits of ICT and eBusiness solutions for enterprises, in particular SMEs. The eFoodChain Reference Framework will enable European companies operating in the cereals, fresh fruits and vegetables and dairy sectors to use ICT more effectively. Complex ERP systems are also available for agro-food companies, but these systems are sector specified. Agro-food part of the food supply chain is a very important sector in Hungary and compilation of empirical and case studies, company analyses can contribute to stimulate enterprises in application of ICTs. Current article authors investigate the importance of different ICT solutions in the business process of fruit and vegetable processing sector.

Methodology Our survey addressed Hungarian enterprises operating in the agro-food sector, it was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2017 and respondents were called by a market research company. Leaders or management members answered the questions in each case. Enterprises have been selected by stratified sampling based on statistics of Hungarian Central Statistical Office. Enterprise size based on staff employed and region at NUTS-2 level were the basis of sampling. The database contains data on ICT usage about 500 enterprises operating in agriculture and food industry as producer or processor. The aim of our research is to determine how food processing enterprises evaluate the role of ICT in their partnerships and business processes and how much difference can be identified between the three sectors.

Methodology The questions analysed are the followings (5-point Likert scale): Question 1: Evaluate the importance of Internet-based solutions for business processes. Question 2: Evaluate the importance of business processes supportable by ICT solutions for their competitiveness. Question 3: Does your enterprise use any information system for business processes? If so, evaluate its usefulness in their internal operation and partnerships. The statistical program SPSS 23 has been used for the calculations. First, a normality test was made and results showed an approximately normal distribution. As a second step, homogeneity test was applied. Our data contains three independent samples, the score given by enterprises from three different sectors. To calculate if there is difference among the sample means of the three groups, one- way ANOVA method was applied. Our hypothesis was that there is significant difference between at least two groups regarding the importance of ICT usage for different business purposes. (significant if F-value > F-critical and p-value < Alpha (0.05) Based on results of ANOVA, our analysis has been complemented by two-sample t-test.

Figure 1.

Results – Figure 1. Figure 1 shows the mean scores given to the importance of ICT solutions in four selected business activities into three sectors. Regarding the first two activities, differences are higher, the two last cases means are lower, but close to each other. ANOVA test calculated on the scores suggests there are differences among score means in the first two cases, but these are not significant. Score means are the lowest in the case of marketing activity, however, in our view, ICT-based marketing activity and marketing research would have an important role in a market share analysis. This type of analysis helps to determine the position of a given enterprise within a sector and to strengthen its position on the market. Total market share is an indicator obtained through different factors, and a market research on customers could help the companies with the assessment of the indicator and improving the quality of Internet presence could help to strengthen their position on the market.

Figure 2. Score means given for the second question are presented in Figure 2. For our survey 4 business activities have been selected which are supportable by ICT. The score means of the fruit and vegetable sector are close to the other two sectors, ANOVA test shows no significant difference among them. However, two-sample t-test suggested a significantly lower difference between meat processing sector and the two other ones in the case of ‘Regular update of website information’ activity (Sig. (2-tailed)=0.0344 ; t-value =2.1814).

Fugure 3. Figure 3 summarizes the score means of enterprises using information systems and values present the evaluation regarding the usefulness of these solutions. Results suggest similar level of usefulness for all three sectors. Based on the evaluation, Human Resources Information System has the lowest means and a low score mean was calculated for enterprises operating in the dairy sector in the case of Integrated Information System. The highest means were given for the Financial, Customer and Logistics Information System, the means are above 4.4 in each cases, these systems were considered the most beneficial.

Conclusion Among sectors, only a few significant differences can be highlighted, there is no large gaps among sectors evaluated in current article. In our previous paper we determined that corporate size has influence on the evaluation of the importance of ICT in business. Our research work will be continued with the analysis of difference between producer and processing sector, namely the assessment of the importance and usefulness of ICT in business activities in different parts of the agrofood supply chain. Our overall conclusion is encouraging higher uptake of ICT is essential for different agro-food sectors and research papers, policy makers, best practices and the presentation of the value of ICT-based activities have a crucial role to remove the barriers enterprises currently face with regard to adoption of ICT. In this way the analyses of enterprises operating in the different parts and sectors of the agrofood chain are important to determine those factors which mean obstacle for them in the exploitation of potential of ICT. Our overall conclusion is the micro and small enterprises need more support both from the side of finance and prepare for usage of these opportunities.

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