Scheme of project structure

Transcription

1 Purpose and scope of the present document is to summarize the general aim and the specific objectives of e-mensa project and illustrating its state of the art in order to start our future work with a common shared knowledge about it. Short project summary To respond to consumer expectations, new approaches to food chain safety and quality assurances are needed and solutions to food supply chain problems are to be searched in order to allow the implementation of an improved supply chain management infrastructure. Supply chain is typically made of multiple companies that are positioned along the food chain acting as independent players. Each player tries to accumulate the maximum advantage and often ignores upstream and downstream problems with the risk of subdividing the overall food chain vision of assuring high quality and safety food to European consumers. In the last decade, severe large-scale food emergencies took place in Europe. Unpredictable accidents, speculative technological management and climatic adversities deeply affected market stability, product supply and consumer health and European consumers have begun to loose confidence in quality and safety systems. Food chain players realised to be impotent in managing quality and safety of foodstuffs with the actual structure of European agro-food supply chain. This project aims at establishing a e-discussion platform for supporting the development of supply chain electronic platforms (e-platforms) in the agro-food sector participated by multi-stakeholder trans-national working groups in order to explore consensus across players/academia on technological strategies, to prepare for future research activities, to support policy development at EU level and to contribute to identifying research agendas for future community research. The issue will be analyzed from the scientific, technological, economic, organisational, regulative and ethical point of view. The result will be a durable pan-european technology platform of academia, industry and consumers for a continuous knowledge-based exchange also beyond project duration. The project work started in February, trough the organization of several working groups with different intermediate objectives The project work plan is based on three main blocks: - Mapping of e-platform technology: preliminary studies will be executed in order to acquire inputs about technological, ethical, economical and managerial issues on existing e-platform. The role of this block is to give the necessary input of information to the subsequent discussion groups. - Discussion groups : they will be organised in two structured rounds (technical and multi-disciplinary) and involve food chain players and academic experts with a consensus driven approach. Focus groups on technical feasibility will be foreseen as well as a multidisciplinary platform on safety, quality and policy assessment. - Dissemination of results: the results of the groups need to become available to potential users in the business, science and policy community. Much effort will be given to dissemination of the results.

2 Scheme of project structure PRELIMINARY STUDIES: MAPPING (WGMAPPING) EUROPEAN REGULATION (WGREG) TECHNICAL PLATFORMS : FOCUS GROUP PRODUCTION (TFG 1) FOCUS GROUP PROCESSING (TFG 2) MULTIDISCIPL INARY PLATFORM: INTEGRATED DISCUSSION PLATFORM ON POLICY, QUALITY AND SAFETY (IDP) FOCUS GROUP TRANSPORT & DISTRIBUTION (TFG 3) POSITION AND CONSENSUS PAPER DISSEMINATION TO BUSINESS, POLICY MAKERS AND SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGICAL STRATEGIES RECOMMENDATIONS RESEARCH AGENDAS WORKSHOPS The core block of the project is the Discussion groups. In fact, from their work will emerge the technological strategies, the research agendas and the recommendations for the implementation of the supply chain e-platforms. However, the project methodology assumes that in order to be effective it is not sufficient to make stakeholders meet with academia. A well-prepared framework for the discussion is necessary which provides two main elements: - the right level of information on the framework of the discussion, - The presence of an animator that will guide the discussion group. For this reason, the project started with an initial block of Preliminary studies. They have the goal of elaborating information and presenting it to the groups in order to allow each participant to have basic information to decide upon. The main information forwarded is: - A survey of existing e-platform experiences in other sectors and a mapping of their elements of success or failure (WGMAPPING), - A selection of technologies and technological options available for the implementation of the supply chain e-platform with an evaluation of their potentialities and drawbacks (WGMAPPING). With this information, concise and well structured, the discussion groups will be able to proceed efficiently in their work. The discussion groups are structured in two rounds: 1. the first technical (agriculture, processing, distribution) and 2. The second multi-disciplinary (safety, quality and policy). We are presently in the first group of discussion. Our working group is going to deal with the aspects related to implementation of an e-platform for supply chain management at farm level, which is at food production level. All the resulting information will be elaborated by a working unit appointed to be the rapporteur and the engine of the entire project: the Executive Committee (ECOM). ECOM has a central

3 role in the project. It will elaborate the meeting minutes, edit papers and documents and generally acts as liaison with the Co-ordinator and as glue through the whole project. The WGMap activity results The activity of WGMAP went on since February. They faced different aspects of the e-platforms applications and produced several documents. Their work was mainly about the following aspects: Provide a review of Supply Chain issues and e-platform functionalities (what e-platforms provide and what they don t) Identify all the relevant activities of Agrifood Supply Chain large spectrum analysis of real needs of an agrifood supply chain Highlight all critical problems of each of the above activities Identify all the areas of potential improvements for each of the above activities Presentation of the comprehensive approaches. The group is still working on several other topics. The Basis of Our Work together From the results of WGMap work some relevant points rise to the attention of our workgroup asking for a further analysis. An efficient agrifood enterprise has to be able to manage market demand and its productive capacity in order to adapt itself even to short-term market fluctuations and therefore take advantage of new opportunities offered by the market. The main difficulty for enterprises operating in the agrifood chain is that treatment of information enabling stakeholder to act according market opportunities is asynchronous. With a more synchronous flow of data and information supply-chain stakeholder could take faster decisions and optimize the service to costumers. The Information Communication Technology is therefore of strategic importance. Management of Supply chain became an issue mainly during the 90s, when most phase of production cycle passed to be managed from a single large enterprise to many independent SMEs, and the problem of coordination rose. Then the first attempt to manage supply chain was in the direction of procurement. However, the management of supply chain to be effective has to be a collaborative one. With the use of new technologies and the spread of internet, there is no more restriction in the possibility of data and information flow. The e-management started and the benefits coming from its adoption are many, for instance: Fast easy and error free processing of the transactions Freeing of human resources from activities of transaction processes and then available for the strategic activities related to costumer care. As you know, the present structure and organization of supply chain revealed to be not effective in facing problems related to climatic emergency, or related to causes affecting human health as methanol, BSE, dioxin. An e-platform can help managing the emergency, but it is only a first step, because many problems can come from the asynchronous flow of data but mainly from the lack of a real collaborative approach between the actors of the supply chain. Nowadays the concept of e-platform for supply chain management has changed and according this change actually an e-platform can be constituted by several parts or components: e-procurement e-supply chain

4 Enterprise resource planning. Those three components have different roles in the complex management activities. E-procurement usually includes the set of tools to manage, usually over internet, information from enterprise to potential suppliers and between enterprise and potential customers. E-Supply chain includes a set of tools aiming at supporting integrated and collaborative management between all the actors of the supply chain, acting as in a perspective of extended enterprise. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a set of applications, which provides functionalities needed for the enterprises management. Nowadays e-platform for supply chain management can have a much more broader strategic impact if integrated and collaborative management become the frame of its implementation, that s why is important that not only operational functions could be available but also that strategic functions allowing long and medium term planning at enterprise level could be developed. Integrated and collaborative approach between the actors of supply chain is needed and this means to switch from the supplier- customer relationship among supply-chain member to a relationship of partnership. In the case of agri-food system, from the point of view of the primary production, e-platform supply-chain new approach should bring to a higher level of collaboration mostly in relation to the following points: The definition of a strategy for long-medium term planning of the marketing, including a clear price and quantity policy, to avoid that stronger members of the supply chain exert oligopolistic behaviours. The quality assurance of supply chain output. In short, agrifood chains reveal major difficulties in setting and operating e-platform systems. This is due to a number of features characterizing agricultural firms, which are summarized and listed below: ABOUT FARM STRUCTURE Small size of farms Financial limitations Fragmented and limited offer Need for horizontal and vertical integration ABOUT INTEGRATION Weakness of agricultural enterprises with respect to the other members of the food supply chain Conflicting interests of supply chain members Lack of trusting and open relationship needed to allow the sharing of sensitive information Need for a culture that values cooperation and communication inside farm business and with trading partners ABOUT MANAGEMENT Poor leadership Poor managerial skills Persistence of traditional management Need to shift from traditional farm management to process management, process improvements and customer relationships. Need for improving management practices in compliance with best practices

5 ABOUT MARKETING COMPETENCIES AND RELATIONS WITH MARKETS Poor marketing skills Poor information about purchasing markets Scarce information about market demand Insufficient capability to follow variable market demand (price, quantity, quality) Scarce information about products to consumer and retail markets Need for traceability application in order to convey information about products to consumers Need for IT adoption in order to allow the transfer of information to and from the markets Need for implementation of e-procurement application in order to facilitate purchasing activities ABOUT ACCOUNTABILITY AND PLANS Poor implementation of farm accountability Poor production planning Need for capture of critical farm data (what, when, why and how much) at every intake point Need for analysis of production costs Need for evaluation of investment operations Need for data analysis to forecast yields and harvest dates Need for production plans ABOUT FARM COMPUTERIZATION Poor knowledge of computer science Poor adoption of management computer systems Need for extending culture and implementation of IT in farm operation This short list of features and problems related to the agricultural sector can lead to the formulation of the following contradictory conclusions: 1. E-platform technology can help solving part of problems listed; 2. E-platform implementation still appears to be difficult mainly at farm level. As a first step toward a new approach to supply chain management the problem of introducing IT in the farms need to be faced, then a proper e-platform could be introduced in order to solve or ease the listed problems. A solution could come from the needing for quality assurance of supply chain outputs. From 1 January 2005, the regulation 178/2002/EC on General Food Law requires traceability to be established at all stages of the food chain. All food and feed businesses within the EU will be required to be able to identify the suppliers of food, feed, food-producing animals and ingredients to their business and the businesses to which products have been sold. Such information must be made available to enforcement authorities on demand. [ ]Traceability systems are joined-up record keeping systems. They bring together information collected at each step of the production process: deliveries from suppliers into the business, through each of the steps, which process and combine the ingredients into new intermediates and products and then deliveries out of the business to the customer. Traceability systems link this information together so that the path of a particular ingredient or batch of product can be seen. The accuracy of the records of ingredient usage, production, etc. is therefore vital to achieving robust traceability..[ ] In many traceability systems information about the product is recorded on data sheets, which accompany each batch through all the stages of the production process. Increasingly these systems are being replaced by computer recording of data; in some cases the amount of data collected by a traceability system just cannot be handled on paper any more. IT enabled systems may also include automatic data collection and equipment such as label printers and bar code readers, which can also

6 bring other operating efficiencies. Extract from first Report Imperial College London inside E- Mensa-SSA Project /WGMAP Enabling Technologies for a Collaborative Supply Chain pag.4. Starting from this focal point should be easier the introduction at farm level of IT enabling the farmer to deal with all documents related to traceability, and then to opening the road to e-platform for agrifood supply chain. On the other hand, the Organic Farms, in order to access to control system related to certification process, already implemented a system of traceability. Some of them use e-platform traceability systems linked to certification bodies. A further effort could be made to link these kind of systems with a supply chain management system so to avoid double registrations and to ease the job of the farmers. This would help the efficiency of traceability system and the reliability of the linked supply chain. Fore more, information about the products can flow from producer to all the other actors of the supply chain and reach the consumer. These are only few of the points to take into consideration in the course of our meeting. The above listed problems at farm level could be solved by the e-platform implementation, but only taking into account the characteristics of our farms in order to find a customized solution. This should be our common effort for the workshop meeting.