Ádám Péntek

ANALYSIS THE ADVANCED ICT USAGE OF THE HUNGARIAN SME SECTOR FOR PREPARING A DOMESTIC AGRI-FOOD RESEARCH

In the Hungarian agro-food sector SMEs have a key role but regarding the tendency of the performance of SME sector, comparing to EU-28 average, the performance of Hungarian SME sector has gradually worsened between 2008 and 2015 while the EU average has an increasing trend. ICT can help enterprises and this article is an overview of the ICT situation of Hungarian SMEs. It is important to analyse in detail the ICT usage characteristics of agro SMEs in the food supply chain because these ICT devices, tools and services are crucial to smooth the information flow within the chain. For all these reasons our work aims to find out how Hungarian agro-food SMEs use ICT and how ICT adoption affect their business procedures, performance and development. A striking observation to emerge from the data comparison is the difference among SMEs and large enterprises regarding the usage of the different basic and advanced ICT solutions. A much bigger percent of large companies use advanced ICT then SMEs and mainly small enterprises are lagging behind as the attitudes of medium sized enterprises are rather similar to the large ones. In Hungary small enterprises in agro-food industry are in difficult financial state and for them free Cloud Computing services can offer good opportunities as they do not have initial costs. ICT adoption is very important to them as ICT sector is a dynamically growing sector and if customers and partners of an enterprise adapt faster to these technological innovations, it may have a negative effect on the different processes, performance and financial results of the organisation. In this article our aim was to determine the main question groups for our questionnaire which focus mainly on ICT solutions supporting the quality of communication and relationship between partners. As the basic IT tools are available in the major part even in the SMEs besides large companies, the two main issues will be the usage of advanced online services and the usage of high quality ICT solutions.

Is it Wo rth being socially Responsible

Several definitions for corporate social responsibility (CSR) exist and these vary greatly as to the activities it should cover and their motivators. Among the benefits of CSR are positive marketing/brand building, brand insurance and employee loyalty. Numerous arguments against CSR prevail, e.g. social responsibility is not a problem that belongs in the sphere of activities a corporation should be addressing or even that CSR distracts businesses from addressing the primary need to concentrate on sales. Thus, the strong economic question: is CSR worth it? In 2014, we carried out a representative survey in Hungary, in which the effects of responsible business practices on consumer purchase behaviour were studied. With our research results, we could show that there is a considerable gap between the apparent interest of consumers in CSR and the limited role of CSR in purchase behaviour.

Socio-economic Factors of Soil Pollution☆

Abstract Analysing the relationship between agricultural production and the natural environment (soil, water and air) and the unfavourable reactions between them became an important question in the second half of the 20th century and nowadays both in Hungary and across Europe. Impairment of the environment is a complex process, it affects all the three basic components of the biosphere (soil, water, air) always at the same time, but the level of the effect is different for each part. Soils are threatened by two basic dangers: the various soil degradation processes (water and wind erosion, acidification, salinisation, physical and biological degradation, unfavourable changes in the humus content and a decrease in the buffer capacity) as well as pollution. In spite of all these, quality, functionality and productivity of soils can be preserved and maintained. Our aim is developing a statistical based information system from the data of the Hungarian Soil Information Monitoring System measured points. We developed a method for estimating element content. To determine the concentration of the elements, we need only the GPS co-ordinates of the place based on the number of nearest neighbouring points. This method does not calculate with spatial circumstances. The other possibility is using the kriging method (spatial interpolation) for estimating more precisely the element content. In this study these two methods are compared. Building our statistical based information system has to determine the number of nearest neighbouring points to be considered in the case of certain elements. We discovered that elements can be ranged only into two groups depending on how many nearest neighbouring diagnostic points were considered to kriging. • 3 neighbouring diagnostical points: K, P, Sr • 10 neighbouring diagnostical points: Al, B, Ba, Ca, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, Na, Ni, Pb, S, Ti, V, Y, Zn Using this method the soil pollution locations and elements and its concentration can be determined. The other important question is to investigate the socio-economic factors of these soil pollutions. There are a lot of data in the Eurostat database which can show the socio-economic effect of these pollutions. Based on these data is concluded that usage amount of chemical fertilizer, total population and total grain yield are the three most important socio-economic factors that contribute to soil heavy metal pollution. Enterprise amount, total cultivated area, gross value of farming, forestry, animal husbandry product as well as total freight amount have less impact on soil heavy metals pollution. Last and least impact factors are GDP and value of industry output in rural area. This article shows our research results on the field of socio-economic factors of soil pollution used by statistical analyses, based on the Eurostat database in Hungary and across Europe.

Digital Business Ecosystem Tools as Interoperability Drivers

Today’s businesses form a highly interconnected network of companies, organisations, technologies, consumers, products and services. The concept of the Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) has been come life in order to build an Internet-based environment in which businesses will be able to interact with each other more efficiently. In a Digital Ecosystem, a leadership structure is formed in order to be capable of responding to the dynamic needs of the environment. The agent in a Digital Ecosystem can both be a client and a server at the same time. With the same message, agents can simultaneously offer a service to others as a Server and request help as a Client. Industries may have their own systems but they are not yet business ecosystems. Digital ecosystems rely on a technological infrastructure to mediate the formalisation of knowledge in SME networks, the creation of software services, and different type of interactions between SMEs. There are many fields of application in the agro-food industry where interoperability of information system would be essential. Amongst others food tracking and tracing, logistics, SRM and CRM integration all need interoperability solution in a heterogeneous environment. Our prototypes can help in building these cooperative information systems.