BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

In this section we give our suggestions for some future research topics. Although progress has been made in operations management that accounts for food quality in recent years, there are still some challenges, which ought to be overcome in future research.

First of all, in the research area of inventory planning and transportation planning, more works should be done to formulate and solve stochastic optimization problems. It is widely agreed that demand can never be a deterministic parameter in this fast changing world. However, among the papers we reviewed, lots of them assume that demand is a constant parameter, or a price/quality dependent parameter. This assumption is quite unrealistic, which restricts the practicability of the proposed models. Although some papers have studied stochastic problems, no breakthrough occurs during the recent years. In this area, there are two directions for the researchers. One direction is to formulate new mathematical models to solve more realistic problems and solve them with existing methods. Another way is to find new methods to solve the stochastic models, which is more challenging and more important for the improvement of this research area.

Next, supply chain disruption should be considered in the existing models. Disruption can happen at any stage of the food supply chain. It can happen either at the production stage, or at the transportation stage due to various reasons including weather changing, vehicle damaging, and machine breakdown. Compared to normal products, disruption can even cause more severe damage in the food industry due to the short lifetime of the food products. Because, when the distribution is delayed, quality of the products will deteriorate in a short time. The prevalence of supply chain disruption in food supply chains makes it crucial to enterprises in the decision-making process. However, supply chain disruption is seldom incorporated in the reviewed studies. In the future, one can reformulate the existing models by introducing supply chain disruptions into one of the distribution phases (inventory, transportation, and retailing) or into multiple phases.

In addition, food quality should be modeled in more practical ways. In the existing body of literature, food quality decaying is roughly modeled and approximated with inaccurate parameters. The approximation does not guarantee the applicability of the models to all products. In future research, more realistic factors need to be considered in modeling food quality in OM models, such as fast changing quality status, chemical and microbial properties of the food, and environmental conditions.

Furthermore, the forward distribution and backward recall problems should be integrated. In the papers on distribution problems, some people studied the location problem. Also, in the recall problems, the location of the recall point also serves as a very important parameter. Therefore, when designing a network, enterprises should consider the forward and backward flows simultaneously. In the future, one can formulate the models with both the distribution problems and the recall problems jointly, with a goal to enhance the firms' benefit and the food safety.

Last, it is also a future research direction to incorporate new product tracking or temperature control technologies. With these new technologies, additional information will be obtained and stored. This will lead to more advanced decision-making on food quality, more precise inventory control, and more efficient distribution systems.