Operations management and collaboration in agri-food supply chains

Abstract

Agri-food supply chains refers to the connections that exist across the agri-food stakeholders from farm to fork related processes. In this environment, operations like planning and control are critical to enhance agri-food supply chains performance and decisions, which are considered complex mainly because the presence of a high variety of information and variables that are required to be managed simultaneously. Hence, the use of a combination of methods, methodologies and multidisciplinary approaches are one of the key trends in research to handle these complexities. The purpose of this is to benefit the agri-food sector by identifying sustainable solutions that will enhance social opportunities, as well as livelihoods, local and national economies. From this, impacts are expected in terms of providing stakeholders with validated scenarios to improve agri-food supply chain resilience, establish agri-food decision-making guidelines to enhance agriculture quality delivery and strengthen agri-food stakeholders position in local and global supply chains. However, since the interdependencies between agri-food stakeholders are related to several agri-food activities, resources and systems, the establishment of collaborative business models across the agri-food supply chain has turned more important than ever, specially to support global agri-food supply chains, food safety and traceability in response to the sustainable global challenges. Therefore, aligned with the H2020 RUC-APS research project, this research focuses in addressing key decision-making challenges in agri-food supply chain environments by connecting key operations management methodologies to collaborative research approaches in the regions of Europe, Asia and South America. The objective is to identify the operations management situations where decisions are made difficult by uncertainty in the agri-food domain, within the study and implementation of Operations Management based approaches in agri-food supply chains.