A customer value-oriented approach is applied to analyze a case study of an ongoing project in rural Thailand to trace quality produce supplied to upmarket retail in the same country. Traceability, an organizational competence, is seldom in business practice as well as in the literature associated with value. It has been stressed through this study that traceability systems involve more than technical and cost-related challenges. Aspects of traceability as a value-related knowledge resource are evoked through viewing traceability as embedded in a 'value network' construct. This view is applied to a food network in a developing economy. In addition, the case study reveals the impact of new technology, how traceability is organized and costs of this organization in a value network. Food product traceability is described as an organized supply chain resource, not limited to IT-related costs driven by needs to succumb to government requirements, which is also applicable in developing economies due to market development and lower IT costs. This customer value-based understanding is of importance when considering investing in traceability and in the design of food product traceability systems, as well as lowering hindrances associated with developing electronic food product traceability using new information technology.
The textiles and garment industry plays an important role in Thailand’s economic growth, despite facing competition in product quality and rising production costs. Meeting diverse consumer needs and satisfaction has become increasingly difficult, as environmental issues become a major concern for firms internationally. Entrepreneurs require sophisticated strategic management techniques to maintain organizational productivity. Growing industries generate material losses, while negatively impacting the environment. Companies may account for their waste, but in reality, actual productivity is much lower, since hidden wastes are mostly unaccounted for and unquantified. A key barrier to reducing waste is that potential cost savings by revising waste management processes are not calculated. To solve this problem, material flow cost accounting (MFCA) was introduced to reduce negative product costs in a ladies’ lingerie company by identifying and evaluating the quantity and cost of concealed material waste. An effective meta-heuristic called the Two-Dimensional Cutting Stock Problem—Tabu Search algorithm (2DCSP-TS) was then proposed based on the idea of finding a layout that minimized a bin length. The multi-phase arrangement strategy embedded in it can obtain near-optimal conditions for solving realistic-sized problems. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, numerical experimental results were compared with those of the current practice. From the numerical experiments, it was found that the proposed technique is an efficient method for reducing negative product costs.
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