Towards a BI Platform to Support Food Traceability Management: Benefits and Challenges Identification

Traceability is one of the key challenges in the food industry drawing attention particularly when a food scandal takes place. It is not just about meeting the quality specifications of the consumer and to abide by the diverse legal requirements and recommendations issued at various levels of authority. Traceability as a key principle aims at providing a fast and efficient support to the management of any identified - actual or potential – quality or safety incidents in the food supply chain. Business Intelligence (BI) platforms are specifically conceived to provide a centralised view on multiple distributed data sources. They are thought to offer many analytical capabilities on these data in order to turn them into information and knowledge and to support managers in their decision making process. However, BI solutions are usually deployed within a single (usually big, multi-national) company, whilst traceability involves multiple actors with potentially divergent interests and diverse levels of willingness to participate. Along this line of thought, integration of management systems within a focal company and throughout the overall supply chain raises specific challenges both technical and managerial. From the starting point of addressing the specific needs of the food supply chain current paper opens the question of a supply chain wide BI platform. Considering this particular context, this first piece of work aims (i) to formalise the potential benefits of such a platform for the domain and (ii) to identify the key challenges.