Cold Supply Chain Processes in a Fruit-and-Vegetable(7)

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Cold Supply Chain Processes in a Fruit-and-Vegetable Collaborative Network 9

4.3 Innovation in the Cold Supply Chain

Innovation is a complex and diversified activity involving many components interacting and acting as sources of new ideas. The PROCONET project is focused on incremental technological innovations, i.e. improvements that are made to a service or an existing process in order to increase the benefits for the chain or the network.

In this project, innovation is oriented towards four large areas (see Table 1), which for the fruit-and-vegetable collaborative network translates into the following factors: renewal and expansion of the productive processes and the range of services, changes in organization and in management, and consequences of the feasibility of the electronic CMR.

Table 1. Technological innovation of the PROCONET project Fruit-and-

vegetable

Sector

Chain transport and handling phases. INCOTERM-based improvements in CMR application. Transport model in Cold Supply Chain, definition of indicators, scoreboard.

Development of a prototype that allows and enables traceability of fruit-and-vegetable products whilst on route and its interaction with

logistical companies.

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Cold Supply Chain transport services in the best conditions.

Application in the traceability of fruit-and-vegetable products.

Application in transport safety.

Application in the fruit-and-vegetable sector and cold chain.

Development under open systems. StorageNodesICTs

5 Conclusions

Alongside the main objective of the PROCONET project, to achieve comprehensive traceability of fruit-and-vegetable transport with controlled temperature (in a collaborative network organization), the research team is pursuing a set of long-term goals which, once the project is completed, may be applied to different areas, depending on the type of enterprise and the business sector addressed:

The project’s consortium has established as a challenge to demonstrate the feasibility of the electronic CMR and its legal implications. If it proves to be

feasible, the challenge is to propose the different Spanish institutions the modification of the current European normative and INCOTERMS agreements. Road export companies would be greatly interested in the results of the prototyping oriented to "on-route transport" because it is a constant source of

conflict between logistic operators, customers and insurance companies.

Logistics companies in the fruit-and-vegetable sector and in other sectors also

working in the cold supply chain will have a great interest in the results of the parameterization of traceability, motivated by option to know the actual characteristics of how their transport has been carried out.