Cold Supply Chain Processes in a Fruit-and-Vegetable(2)

果蔬冷链

4 M.V. de-la-Fuente and L. Ros

be developed in the project, and proposes the PROCONET architectural design and components of the fruit-and-vegetable collaborative network, information systems and network data exchange techniques. Section 5 presents the main conclusions and innovation aspects of the PROCONET project.

2 Collaborative Networked Organizations

Participation in networks has become very important for any organization that strives to achieve a differentiated competitive advantage. Among the wide variety of existing networks, collaborative networks are especially relevant. These have emerged over the last few years as a result of the challenges faced by both the business and scientific world, since collaboration has become the key issue to rapidly answer market demands in manufacturing companies through sharing competence and resources [5].

A collaborative network (CN) is constituted by a variety of entities (e.g. organizations and people) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital and goals. Nevertheless, these entities collaborate to better achieve compatible goals, using ICT for supporting the development of collaborative business opportunities [3]. As dynamic inter-organizational models, CNs must display a distributed business process management system to support the means for obtaining, providing and managing production-related information from and about CNs, enabling enterprises to conduct their logistics more efficiently, and working better in an integrated and virtual environment [9]. In this context, communication mechanisms play a vital role, alongside coordination to support the exchange of information between interdependent activities / processes and among CN enterprises [2].

For this reason, the advantages in the ICT that support the concept of collaborative networks have allowed enterprises to move to more cooperative information-driven environments. Enterprise knowledge sharing (know-how), open source / web-based applications, and common best practices are ways to achieve both the concept of integrated enterprise and the implementation of collaborative networked enterprises for the manufacturing industry [5].

Finally, it must be noted that a growing number of collaborative networked organization forms are emerging as a result of the continuous advances in the field of ICT, which contributes to help SMEs face current social and market challenges. CNs are already recognized as an important survival instrument for organizations in a period of turbulent socio-economic changes [3,5].

3 The Fruit-and-Vegetable Spanish Sector: Problems and

Necessities

In the last thirty years the fruit and vegetable sector has become the first sector of Spanish agriculture in terms of production value. Spain is the major producer of fruits and vegetables for consumption in fresh and the major exporter of these products.