Picking, sorting, processing, and grading tea leaves make up the fabric of life here. And ensuring that people around the globe get their daily cups of chai, Earl Grey, English Breakfast, or Orange Pekoe is crucial to the local economy and jobs.
To maintain all the above, this multimillion-dollar industry relies on the Colombo Tea Auction – a weekly event that has been held in the national capital under rules and procedures largely unchanged since they were first laid down in the 1880s and 1890s.
Until now, putting lots of fine Ceylon tea under the hammer and up for export was a noisy and very physical affair. Bidding echoed in rapid-fire across the three theater-like auction rooms that were often packed with hundreds of brokers and officials, many of them jotting down numbers of paper sheets.
This ritual ended in mid-March, not because it was regarded as old-fashioned or inefficient, but as a matter of health and safety.
“When the COVID-19 pandemic hit our country, it was impossible for our traditional tea auction to follow social distancing and other health guidelines,” recalls Jayantha Edirisinghe, Sri Lanka’s Tea Commissioner.
The auction schedule was suspended for two weeks. With a potentially devastating economic shock looming, the Sri Lanka Tea Board and its Tea Traders Association turned to a local Microsoft partner, CICRA Solutions, to create a fast digital alternative that would also incorporate the spirit and ways of the old system.
The company had previously scored successes for the industry by automating its complex tea brokering practices and by modernizing the Tea Board’s back-office system. Now, with the pandemic worsening, the time had come for a digital transformation of the whole auction process.