A case study
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Journal Title
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2020
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Information and Service Management (ISM)
Language
en
Pages
87
Series
Abstract
Recently, food origin has attracted a lot of attention among media and consumers. Due to increased end-user interest around food, the food companies’ possibility to trace and track their product increases customer satisfaction and gives value to the products. Also, the financial benefit achieved by efficiently recall products is motivating companies to consider their food traceability. As a result, a well-functioning and accurate food traceability system (FTS) should be in priority of any food company. In order to make the companies meet the desires of better traceability, the purpose of this thesis is to study how FTS could be improved. The scope for the thesis is limited to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) which represent the majority of European food suppliers. The significance of the thesis is increased by the fact that SMEs have weak opportunities to invest into FTSs because of their scarce resources. The research is conducted as an interpretive case study. The focus is on the internal traceability of the case company, but paper aims for widely utilizable and generalizable solutions. To the objective of the research, the research outlines improvement process for FTS in SME. Outlined process presents the relevant factors that shall be considered in the improvement. Furthermore, three different perspectives to solutions to improve FTS are identified. These solutions are fixing the fundamental features of FTS, implementing traceability technologies, and/or using practices of operations management. The research indicates that the identified solutions can be divided into short and long-term solutions depending on the resources, time and commitment given to the improvement process. Even though earlier studies stress the benefits of traceability technologies in improvement of FTS, this research recommends SMEs to search solutions from other perspectives in the short-term as the uncertainties are still high with many traceability technologies. Especially, the adapted operations management (OM) perspective serves superior solutions to the case company. Overall, the research serves novel insights to the earlier literature regarding FTS improvement. Furthermore, the adapted OM perspective serves deep insight into the operational risks which are preventing FTSs to work effectively. In addition, the research includes a wide definition of what is the state of food traceability studies today. Further research is needed to achieve more standardization of food traceability, achieve end-to-end chain orchestration, lower the barriers to adapt traceability technology, increase granularity and ease the traceability of agricultural materials. In total, more research on finding ways which makes it easier for SMEs to improve essential product traceability is needed.Description
Thesis advisor
Finne, MaxKeywords
food traceability, food safety, internal traceability, operational risks