S. I. Lao

A real-time food safety management system for receiving operations in distribution centers

Highlights? Help reduce the difficulties in safety plan development using knowledge-based expert system. ? Help achieve improvement in operation management. ? Help achieve improvement in timeframe for resource assignment. ? Help achieve improvement in customer satisfaction and quality. Food safety plan is being promoted in the food industry by the Hong Kong Government as a preliminary quality control tool. However, it appears to be a challenging task for Distribution Centers (DC) that handles food inventory since most of them are lack of knowledge and know how technology to manage information in a real time base. This paper proposes a Radio Frequency Identification based Food Operations Assignment System (RFID-FOAS) to help DC facilitates the food safety control activities in receiving areas by generating a proper safety plan. The system has adopted the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) technique to facilitate the inventory data-capturing process and assist in formulating decisions, respectively. The developed system aims to help reduce the difficulties in safety plan development using a knowledge-based expert system. The significance and contribution of RFID-FOAS in the context of managing the inventory quality in DC for safety plan development is demonstrated through the adoption of the system in a Hong Kong-based logistics company. The generated results show that the decision-making process of the safety plan development is facilitated. Moreover, the real-time data capturing nature of RFID technology has further improved the efficiency and timeframe requested for the actions. With the support of RFID-FOAS, the data capture system and the decision-making time is minimized. As a result, inventory quality and customer satisfaction level are significantly improved.

Achieving quality assurance functionality in the food industry using a hybrid case-based reasoning and fuzzy logic approach

Quality control of food inventories in the warehouse is complex as well as challenging due to the fact that food can easily deteriorate. Currently, this difficult storage problem is managed mostly by using a human dependent quality assurance and decision making process. This has however, occasionally led to unimaginative, arduous and inconsistent decisions due to the injection of subjective human intervention into the process. Therefore, it could be said that current practice is not powerful enough to support high-quality inventory management. In this paper, the development of an integrative prototype decision support system, namely, Intelligent Food Quality Assurance System (IFQAS) is described which will assist the process by automating the human based decision making process in the quality control of food storage. The system, which is composed of a Case-based Reasoning (CBR) engine and a Fuzzy rule-based Reasoning (FBR) engine, starts with the receipt of incoming food inventory. With the CBR engine, certain quality assurance operations can be suggested based on the attributes of the food received. Further of this, the FBR engine can make suggestions on the optimal storage conditions of inventory by systematically evaluating the food conditions when the food is receiving. With the assistance of the system, a holistic monitoring in quality control of the receiving operations and the storage conditions of the food in the warehouse can be performed. It provides consistent and systematic Quality Assurance Guidelines for quality control which leads to improvement in the level of customer satisfaction and minimization of the defective rate.

Real‐time inbound decision support system for enhancing the performance of a food warehouse

Purpose – With the increasing concerns about food management, attention is placed on the monitoring of different potential risk factors for food handling. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a system that helps facilitate and improve the quality of decision making, reduces the level of substandard goods, and facilitates data capturing and manipulation, to help a warehouses improve quality assurance in the inventory‐receiving process with the support of technology.Design/methodology/approach – This system consists of three modules, which integrate the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, case‐based reasoning (CBR), and fuzzy reasoning (FR) technique to help monitor food quality assurance activities. In the first module, the data collection module, raw warehouse and work station information are collected. In the second module, the data sorting module, the collected data are stored in a database. In this module, data are decoded, and the coding stored in the RFID tags are transfor...

Determination of the success factors in supply chain networks: a Hong Kong‐based manufacturer's perspective

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to investigate the factors that affect the decision‐making process of Hong Kong‐based manufacturers when they select a third‐party logistics (3PL) service provider and how 3PL service providers manage to retain customer loyalty in times of financial turbulence.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a survey‐based study targeting Hong Kong‐based manufacturers currently using 3PL companies. It investigates the relationship between the reasons for using 3PL services and the requirements for selecting a provider, and examines the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty. In addition, the relationships among various dimensions – in small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), large enterprises and companies – of contracts of various lengths are investigated.Findings – In general, the reasons for using 3PL services and the requirements for selecting 3PL service providers are positive‐related. The dimension of “reputation” of satisfaction influences “pri...

A real-time replenishment system for vending machine industry

This paper outlines the needs of the vendor-machines information network for automating the selling operations in a low operating cost. Besides, the architecture framework of real-time transmission of the selling information is determined for analyzing and providing decision support effectively

An RFRS that combines RFID and CBR technologies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a real‐time food receiving operations management system (RFRS), focusing on demonstrating the use of a case‐based reasoning (CBR) and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in managing the complex food receiving activities in distribution centers, to deal with the global concerns in food safety management.Design/methodology/approach – The proposed system includes a CBR engine for generating customized operating procedures by retrieving and analyzing relevant knowledge stored in the database and case library. In addition, RFID technology is adopted to gather real‐time inventory information for visualizing inventories, work stations, and equipment status.Findings – The significance and contribution of RFRS in the context of managing unstructured operations in distribution centers for the food receiving process are demonstrated by adopting the system in one of the Hong Kong‐based logistics companies. The achieved improvement of order fulfillment hel...