THEMN-2007: Fruit Industry Supply Chain Optimization

A. M. BLANCO; G.L. MASINI; N. PETRACCI; J.A. BANDONI

The Horticultural Economics and Management Newsletter

Horticultural Economics & Management

Año: 2007 vol. 6 p. 4 - 4

Although Supply Chain optimization is a mature field, very few contributions on Fruit Industry Supply Chain (FISC) modeling with management purposes have appeared in the open literature. According to the authors? knowledge, only three contributions on the whole FISC system, have been presented so far: Masini et al. (2003), Ortmann (2005) and Masini et al. (2007). In Masini et al. (2003) a preliminary planning model of a typical large company operating in the Argentinean pip fruit (apples and pears) supply chain was firstly described. Recently, that model was extended in Masini et al. (2007) to address the company?s tactical planning problem. The resulting LP multi-period model is based on a realistic description of the network topology and spans a one-year horizon with a weekly resolution in order to comprehend the whole fruit season with the required detail. The model contemplates farms, packaging plants, cold storage facilities, concentrated juice plants, milling plants and cider plants along with clients and third party raw material and services suppliers. For given processing and storage capacities and estimations of own fruit production and quality per variety, the model returns the amounts of packed fruit, concentrated juice and cider that should be allocated in the different markets to maximize the total profit of the business along with the required third party resources (raw material, storage and transportation) to optimally operate the system. The model was conceived as a decision support tool to aid in the negotiation instance of the FISC business when sales commitments and third party resources purchase have to be decided.