Janaína Deane de Abreu Sá Diniz

Supply Chain Management and Supply Chain Orientation: a necessity for sustainable development projects in developing countries?

In developing countries, many projects are seeking regional and sustainable development by trying to promote local products and companies. Our paper tries to evaluate Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Supply Chain Orientation (SCO) in the design and implementation of projects aiming at the enhancement of sustainable regional development in two Brazilian Amazonian states. Our main objective is to evaluate if the lack of SCM and SCO is a factor of failure of those projects. The paper begins with the definitions of the main concepts related to the research. Then, it presents the context and analysis of six projects aiming at the enhancement of sustainable development of local communities through the promotion of the forest products by six different collecting co-operatives. The evaluation was obtained by mixing case study and empirical data from the six projects. The conclusion presents the outputs of the analysis, which can be useful to similar projects, especially those related to the design of sustainable and regionally adapted productions and supply chain configurations.

An intelligent vehicle routing system for family farming collective organisations

This paper presents an implementation of the Ant Colony Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). For the calculation of the best way between two adjacent points in the route, the classical algorithm of Dijkstra was used. Field activities and tests were carried out in different collective organisations, and collection and distribution route maps were created for each pilot–organisation. During the development of the system, some processes were revised in order to better adjust the routes, after considering the parameters related to cost, time and sales volume. The main difficulties in the development of this system were related to the adaptation of the standards proposed by urban routing systems to a rural context. Also, concerning the future trends of the model, many efforts have been made to improve the geographical interface and to test other VRP algorithms, like VRP with time windows and Dynamic VRP.

Integrated Logistics in the Supply of Products Originating from Family Farming Organizations

The family farming sector is of fundamental importance for food safety in Brazil and other countries. This sector mobilizes 14 million people and represents 60% of the agricultural workers. The small farms represent 75% of the rural properties, 25% of national cultivated land and 35% of the national agricultural production (IBGE, 2006)1. A great diversity of food, especially that which forms the basis of the diet of the Brazilian population originates from small farmers, in particular those who work in the vegetable sector. The main characteristic of this production is that it happens in small family farms with a predominance of short production cycles, strong seasonality, intensive use of manpower and highly perishable products. Besides their logistics difficulties to access their clients, the small family farmers also have problems to insert their products in the institutional and fair trade market that requires volume, special schedules and higher quality standards. That means that the products present short post-harvest periods, which influence the location of the crops, which must be preferentially close to the consumer market. These elements presented demand researches related to process and practices that can increase the shelf life of these products. In this context, we verify a tendency of the family farmers to organize themselves in associations or cooperatives. That is why it is necessary to analyze how logistics can be a strategic instrument of competitiveness for these organizations. They really need to be organized to access markets and that is why logistics management can improve their level of organization, helping them to become more efficient and have better management, not only of their production, but also of storage and distribution processes. The challenge is to distinguish the context of each group of family farmers (vegetables, dairy, handicrafts, tourism and others), even if they do more than one of these activities. There are particularities existing in each one of the logistic chains of family farmers’ products and that makes the complexity of these chains a challenging search for solutions. If the implementation of integrated logistics is complex for large companies, the same logic can be applied to small organizations, even if the contexts are distinct. While large

Reasoning elements for a vehicle routing system

Logistic processes are a challenge to collective organizations of rural producers. The lack of technological support in those processes is an obstacle for the maintenance of the small producers in the distribution channels. A research theme is the adaptation of some logistic models normally adequate for urban reality to the context of small rural organizations. This adaptation seems pertinent, since some particularities of this kind of organization can be associated to complex problems related to the supply chain. In the case presented in this work, the first stage in the development of the system consisted in defining the main problems related to the inefficiency of the collection and distribution processes. Costs concerning the logistics processes were also measured. In this paper we propose the reasoning elements regarding a routing system and methods for cost estimation adapted to small rural organizations.