Supporting the Animal Feed Industry in an E-Business Environment Using Simulation

Recent health and food contamination scares have put Europe’s feed industry under new scrutiny. As a result food manufacturers are increasingly forced to change and adopt new strategies, both to regain consumer confidence and to remain competitive. To this end the EU has funded a two-year project called CHAINFEED, to research and develop a new business model for the feed industry. Drawing upon the insights gained from this industry a modelling framework encompassing a number of views of the animal feed supply chain have been established. Modelling the flows of product and information in particular supply chain scenarios provides identification of critical business process activities. The models established for this research served two purposes. Firstly to identify the main players in the animal feed supply chain and their role in supplying information and product to the farmers. Secondly to identify a new strategy for the feed producers to improve their supply chain performance. The new strategy identified is vendor-managed-inventory (VMI). In order to test the applicability of the particular model identified and capture the relevant characteristics of the animal feed supply chain a simulation tool for modelling VMI was developed.