Ready4Trade
Central Asia

Project mission

ITC previously implemented EMCI in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan to facilitate export management for SMEs in these countries via business-related training on the ground. The project’s current goal is to support the development of intra-regional and international trade in five Central Asian (CA) countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

It is the trade component of a larger EU-funded programme that aims to support investment, competitiveness, and trade in Central Asia, thus contributing to sustainable and inclusive economic development in the region.

To boost intra-regional and international trade, ITC trains Export Management Coaches (EMCs), who then deliver on-the-job coaching to offer practical and action-oriented advisory services to local businesses.

Coaching focuses on five thematic areas

Export planning and pro forma invoicing

Mandatory certifications, registrations and buyer standards

International shipping by sea and air freight

Customs and duties

Packaging and labelling

For more information on the R4TCA project, please visit site

It is the first time that EMCI is running in five countries simultaneously. The growth of the project means more people involved, more activities to coordinate, and more ambitious objectives to pursue.

ITC’s aims under this programme

Challenges

The main challenge for ITC was to coordinate missions and formalise recommendations provided by the coaches. Initially, the project was using a paper-based manual mission report to track their activities with SMEs. R4TCA implementers saw digitalisation as a major opportunity for improvement.

Below are examples of issues that digitising the manual resolved:

Extensive use of paper (minimum 2 reams of paper per SME)

Challenges with manually tracking coaching mission statuses, outputs, and outcomes

Lack of readily available mission critical information

ITC had to manually calculate any mission statistics

Coaching reports presented challenges with storing, extracting, compiling, and using data derived from coaching

Challenges of information accessibility to the Institutional Partners in each country, the ITC, EU, and other stakeholders

How our product solves the challenges

Saving efforts: Better reporting and coordination

The web application we developed is now ITC’s reliable tool for coordinating EMCI. Both SMEs and coaches track their activities in electronic form, generating valuable data that is analysed and disseminated quickly and conveniently. ITC can monitor mission progress. Planning and implementing the project and missions became significantly easier and faster.

Saving paper: Fully paperless and eco-friendly alternative

Going paperless is an internationally recognised way to make your operations greener and more sustainable. The digital tool is a long-term solution that can help prevent the extensive use of paper in future projects, too.

~400 reams or 200,000 sheets of paper

the alternative costs of running a paper-based version of the R4TCA EMCI component

Collecting data for analysis

The real challenge with paper-based documentation that includes hundreds of Initial Approach Questionnaires was not only related to the time it took to draft it. It was also about what happened to the data collected. There were no plans to digitise the inputs. Technically, all the reports would eventually sit in the NPM's offices and collect dust.

Instead, a unified regional data collection platform made adding, storing, processing, and sharing data possible, convenient, and accessible for subsequent analysis.

Platform developed locally

The R4TCA project is funded by the EU, with the overarching goal of facilitating economic development in the Central Asian region. Therefore, choosing Mad Devs, a development team whose developers are located in the region was all but natural. With that, ITC contributed to the growing innovative, export-oriented software development sector.

Sustainability

Sustainability is one of the key paradigms of the R4TCA project. Digital transformation efforts initiated by the ITC have greatly contributed to sustainability through innovative efforts by Mad Devs in a twofold format.

The initial sustainability round transpires into the minimum estimated savings of paper alone amounted to at least 80 boxes or 400 reams of paper. This perfectly aligns with the EU sustainability and environmental protection goals.

However, the sustainability wave does not dissipate with the above. The augmented and customized versions of the digital platform would enhance and contribute to sustainability in the subsequent global initiatives, too.

We consider the development of this digital manual to be not an expense, but an investment. The automation of reporting means that the project can be replicated and that its mission is easier to achieve.

Edwin Johan Santana Gaarder, International Consultant

Developing the innovation

Mad Devs onboarded the development team and produced the minimum viable product (MVP) of the EMCI manual in record time.

The MVP featured entity profiles, key elements of the workflow engagement history, and planning functionality. The application also enables users to manage SMEs’ profiles (fill out questionnaires and collect feedback), create coaching mission intervention reports, and plan and track coaching missions (by importing CSV files).

The MVP is scalable, meaning that further adjustments and enhancements can be made and the existing system will handle them. We planned for scalability when developing the app’s architecture and infrastructure. We wanted the application to be user-friendly and perform flawlessly, so we worked on more than the basic functionality.

1. Built a data backup system with daily backups
2. Set up a CI/CD pipeline
3. Introduced a staging environment in addition to the production environment
4. Introduced an infrastructure monitoring system
5. Covered with integration and unit tests
6. Created a user manual with screenshots from the app and with descriptions of its functions in Russian, which all the coaches speak

The web application works on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android, so the coaches can use it on any device. We also added a multilingual user interface and made the app adaptable for various countries.

Functionality

We created three user categories for the application (Coaches, Institutional Partners [IPs], and ITC Admins). Users are also grouped by country, and access to features was customised by user group. Coaches can create new country-specific SMEs and search among existing ones. The coaches’ and IPs’ profiles are searchable, and the app tracks engagement history, reports mission progress, and calculates statistics.

Infrastructure

We set up a CI/CD pipeline to update new features/bug fixes on the fly. We also added a staging environment to test updates before deployment. The monitoring system we put in place allows continuously checking the infrastructure’s performance and configuring relevant alerts.

Our approaches

In development, we relied on Domain-Driven Design (DDD) values and the Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) principle. CQRS is an approach that involves separating read and command operations, thus creating a better architecture and improving the observability of the entire system.

Benefits of CQRS

Benefits of Domain-driven design

Domain-driven design helps the team create a common model. The teams from the customer’s side and from the developers’ side can then use this model to communicate the requirements. A domain model is modular and encapsulated, enabling the system to be changed and improved regularly and continuously.

Requirements are always explained from the domain perspective. Conceptualising the software system in terms of the business domain reduces the risk of misunderstandings between the domain experts and the development team.