Title: Improve food retail supply chain operations with dynamic pricing and product tracing

Authors: Dong Li, Ou Tang, Christopher O'Brien, Xiaojun Wang

Addresses: Management School, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK. ' Department of Production Economics, Linkoping Institute of Technology, Linkoping S-581 83, Sweden. ' Operations Management Division, Nottingham University Business School, Jubilee Campus (New Building), Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK. ' Management School, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK

Abstract: This paper investigates the potential value adding capability of dynamic product tracing to the food supply chain management. As the environment of supply chain processes affect product quality significantly, technologies and approaches for tracking and tracing products have the potential to improve the food supply chain performance by dynamically identifying product quality situations. This can be achieved by tracing the product manufacturing and supply process with Automatic Product Identification (AutoID) technologies. An optimisation model has been developed to generate optimal pricing policies based on the dynamically identified product quality information. The research concluded that the dynamic identification of the product value (quality) would generate benefits to the food supply chain management with widely adopted optimal pricing approaches.

Keywords: food retail supply chains; automatic identification; AutoID; product AutoID systems; dynamic pricing; supply chain management; SCM; product tracing; optimisation; optimal pricing policies; product quality; product information; product value.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOI.2006.012161

International Journal of Services Operations and Informatics, 2006 Vol.1 No.4, pp.347 - 362

Published online: 25 Jan 2007 *

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