Abstract
The floricultural sector is facing market developments that have forced a redesign of the European logistics network. Via workshops and interviews with key stakeholders the main developments and industry needs are identified. These are then summarised in three central themes that require further investigation, i.e. decision problems (e.g. network design and control), context factors (e.g. demand uncertainty and product perishability), and objectives (e.g. efficiency and product quality). Thereafter, 17 articles that review Supply Chain Management (SCM) research are analysed to obtain more insight into the state-of-the-art on these themes and to identify the main issues within the themes and their interrelationships. This resulted in a conceptual research framework in which particular attention is given to how decision problems could be modelled and solved in order to get quantitative insights into the impact of logistics network redesign. Successively, 71 SCM articles were analysed in depth to classify current SCM research and to determine research gaps and challenges. Results show that Floricultural SCM research challenges can be found in integrated, quality-driven and responsive network design and control using hybrid optimisation and simulation.
Highlights
The floricultural sector is of world-class quality, and the Netherlands serves as the main trading hub for Europe (Porter et al, 2011)
The aim of this research was to create an overview of floricultural sector developments and Supply Chain Management (SCM) themes that require further investigation, to analyse current research that addresses those themes and to subsequently define floricultural SCM research challenges from a quantitative modelling perspective
It was found that the main SCM themes and subsequent SCM issues are (1) decision problems: network design and network control; (2) context factors: supply and demand uncertainty, perishability, product and market differentiation; and (3) objectives: efficiency, responsiveness and product quality
Summary
The floricultural sector is of world-class quality, and the Netherlands serves as the main trading hub for Europe (Porter et al, 2011). The development of a global supply chain network and more importantly the emergent virtualisation of the supply chain network (Verdouw et al, 2012) lead to more direct flows bypassing the current Dutch physical logistics network. It creates necessities and opportunities for redesigning the European logistics network and its coordination and control. These disciplines study the consequences of perishable product and food characteristics on the management of supply chains They have received increasing attention due to food quality and food safety issues (Akkerman et al, 2010).
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