Title: Balancing environmental and economic performance in the food processing industry

Authors: Renzo Akkerman, Dirk Pieter Van Donk

Addresses: Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Produktionstorvet 424, 2800, Kgs. Lyngby, Copenhagen, Denmark. ' Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV, Groningen, The Netherlands

Abstract: Changing customer requirements, unpredictable disturbances combined with expensive production facilities, are major problems for food processing companies to achieve synergy between the economic and environmental performance. There is notably a lack of tools to support decisions to explore effects on performance related to new product introductions, changes in production equipment, changes in planning concepts and their cross sections. We argue that interdisciplinary research that uses operations research techniques, operations management insights, food process technology and product design helps in exploring the effect of uncertainty in demand and production. As a result, process design can be more robust: both economic and environmental. This position paper explores the problem and the main elements of the proposed scenario-based simulation approach.

Keywords: food industry; sustainability; product design; process design; simulation; scenario analysis; environmental performance; economic performance; operations management; decision support; food processing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEIM.2010.031906

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 2010 Vol.11 No.3, pp.330 - 340

Published online: 02 Mar 2010 *

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