Many current commercial warehouse management systems offer fragmented solutions and lack the ability to adopt a holistic perspective to supply chain integrity owing to an absence of information-sharing channels and the necessary tools to obtain relevant environmental data. Given a global need to increase transparency and responsiveness, reduce lead times and enhance security in the perishable food chain, the shift from FIFO to FEFO strategies has gathered significant traction. Most conventional systems estimate shelf life based on an onsite approach and a handover of information which, in many cases, is not based on the actual supply chain history to which the product was exposed.
This article presents the base for an integrated approach in which front-end sensor technologies enable the use of generic shelf life modelling approaches taken from the post-harvest research area to alter the decision dynamics in a cold chain with state-of-the-art algorithms. By combining this with systems for real-time monitoring of supply chain conditions, the perishable specific supply chain optimization algorithms can be used to form a strategic response management system optimizing product flows by taking into account the shelf life inventories and estimated shelf life distances between different nodes in the supply chain. The estimated shelf life distances for a particular batch can be taken as a guide to evaluate the potential of the given batch for all the possible transportation scenarios, while proper confidence intervals should still be considered to account for the omnipresent biological variation limiting the accuracy of the shelf life prediction models.
Although the technical means are available to implement such data-driven model-based optimization approaches in practice, its success will largely depend on the chain-wide willingness to participate in and contribute to the information-sharing highways.