A web mobile application for agricultural machinery cost analysis

Information and communications technology (ICT) has an increasingly important role on business processes and provides a powerful foundation to address many daily problems. Today users want to be connected to useful information in real time. To that effect, the aim of this work was to develop an easy-to-use mobile application, called “AMACA” (Agricultural Machine App Cost Analysis) for determining the machinery cost in different field operations and making it available via a web mobile application using a cross-platform approach. The customer-driven Quality Function Deployment [QFD] approach was implemented in order to link the user expectations with the design characteristics of the app. The AMACA app is free, readily available, and does not require any installation on the end user's device. It is a cross-platform application meaning that it operates on any device through a web interface and is supported by various browsers. The user can make subsequent calculations by varying the input parameters (fuel price, interest rate, field capacity, tractor power, etc.) and compare the results in a sensitivity analysis basis. AMACA app can support the decisions on whether to purchase a new equipment/tractor (strategic level), the use of own machinery or to hire a service, and also to select the economical appropriate cultivation system (tactical level).