Abstract:
This thesis starts with two examples of food incidents in Tanzania giving the reader the first insight into how track and tracing systems can be useful both in terms of protecting consumer’s health and in terms of economical repercussions when it is well designed and executed.
To ensure the ongoing safety of food along the supply chain, traceability must be built into every step of the process. Traceability systems help companies minimize the production and distribution of unsafe or poor quality products, which in turn minimizes the potential for negative publicity, liability and recalls. The better and more precise the tracing system, the faster you can identify and resolve food safety or quality problems. This is best accomplished through a well designed and executed T&T system. A T&T System that takes into account of the contextual factors during design and execution will ultimately promote the availability of accurate and real-time information to all nodes of the supply chain, from raw materials and component suppliers, to manufacturers, distributors, transportation providers and consumers.
The first chapter of this project gives general introduction to the problem and then description of the reasons compelled me to carry out this project (motivation for the study). Chapter two deals with literature review. In this chapter, various models dealing with traceability systems directly or indirectly are fully explored and evaluated on the basis of their validity, reliability and relevance to the study. Chapter three deals with development of the research model, the research model is developed as a result of various models explored in chapter two including IMAQE-Food model developed by Van der Spiegel and co-authors (2003), and traceability system parameters model developed by Kousta (2006). This chapter also deals with development of different indicators which have been used to operationalise the research model. Chapter four is about methodology of the study. Chapter five is discussing the results of the study obtained after the analysis. The result of this analysis is identification of bottlenecks. Chapter six is about assessment of different solutions of the identified bottlenecks. Chapter seven is about general evaluation of the project including conclusions and recommendations.
The research conducted in this thesis may be useful to many organisations/companies. It may assist them to understand various factors which are influencing the design and execution of the traceability system and thereby improve the performance of their traceability systems.
