Lean supply chain and perishable products

Filed in archive Point of view on August 3, 2007

Sorry for the delay, actually I was on a trip to the north of Norway which was quite a nice experience. In my way to a city called Bodø I was thinking about a special type of supply chain: Supply chain systems for perishable products.

The train part of my trip, I have to confess, was exhausting and I was in the train for 26 hours (Norway is a long country): If we are supposed to move products like bread to such locations in Norway, it doesn't make sense to transport them through air and establishing decentralized baking centers is not an efficient option either.

In such situations, what we need is a lean supply chain. The ideal situation is that, based on the recent historical data, the company prepares and ship the final products to the destination without any buffer. In such systems the order fulfillment elements and transit monitoring are more important that sophisticated forecasting features.

I don't know whether in the bread industry we have good example of such model but I heard something about Flowers Foods which uses HighJump Software and is doing a good job.

Do you know other examples in perishable products sector?