Production and Logistics Planning in Seed Corn

Abstract

In wide countries like Brazil, the USA, and others, supply chains of seed corn can involve multiple disperse crop fields, processing plants, and demand spots, which require complex and elaborate aggregate production and distribution planning to attend predefined harvest plans and meet forecasted product demands. The limited processing capacities of the plants are also relevant for this tactical planning.Seed corn enterprises that have experienced rapid growth or operate in a complex and changing environment had a tendency to create simple practical rules, sometimes disconnected, to develop production and logistics plans. For instance, some of them have focused on only a few variables relevant to planning, like the distances between crop fields and processing plants, disregarding other relevant variables, such as the unit production and distribution costs and the goods and services circulation taxes involved.Optimization approaches have been applied to support production, inventory, and distribution aggregate planning decisions in different agribusiness settings, considering several technical and economical criteria and constraints. As these approaches are incorporated into decision support systems, they become powerful and flexible for the analysis and planning of these systems under different scenarios. Several examples of successful applications in production and logistics planning of agribusiness supply chains can be found