Operational Sustainability Perspective for Fresh-Produce Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

The development of tracking and traceability systems for fresh produce supply chains takes place in connection with a couple of research and technological advancements over the past few years. But recently, it stands in close connection to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well. Specifically, Goals 11 and 12 namely “Sustainable Communities” and “Responsible Consumption and Production” have revolutionized the design and development of Smarter Fresh Produce Supply Chains over the past few years and will continue to correlate with SDGs and improve further in years to come. The ever-advancing sensor technologies and consequently, the ever-increasing possibility of designing smarter supply chains for highly sensitive fresh produce sectors are now becoming evident. This specific field of research has always been a focus of attention for logistics’ researchers across the globe. Operational logistics in entire supply chain cycle has massive dependability on domains which apply tracking and traceability as the base operations. The relevant tracking devices such as Internet of Things (IoTs), Radio Frequency Identification (RFIDs), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), QR codes may be designed to work well for a limited range of applications. However, the interoperability issues between the enterprise applications and traceability equipment must be relaxed to scale up their usability. The current trends in logistics industry and the government regulations revealed for food safety in the developed world influence researchers and technologists to design smart supply chains with seamless integration to existing ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning). However, it has always been a big challenge to bridge the gaps across different logistics operations, i.e., goods movement tracking, inventory management, and environmental impact data. There have been many initiatives in this domain but with limited capabilities and there exists a margin of operational optimizations, as always. That is why, the research phenomenon discussed as part of this chapter, i.e. “Operational Sustainability for Fresh-produce SMEs from Logistics Point of View”, has a clear-cut motivation across all the relevant dimensions, i.e. design of traceability systems and tracking services (System goal), use of advanced sensor technologies such as IoT (technology goal), and design of smarter supply chains (knowledge goal), with a focus on operational sustainability for highly subtle fresh produce sectors (end-user goal). In this chapter, the authors provide a systematic analysis of technological advancements, standardizations, challenges, and solutions across all these aforementioned dimensions, from IT enabling perspective.