Supply chain management of milled grain products: A review and conceptual framework

The total supply chain management of milled grain products in South Africa comprises of four main sub systems: farming sub system, transportation sub system, milling plant sub system and retailer sub system. These four sub systems consist of several components and sub-components. Therefore, this system is much complicated and has attracted multi-disciplinary scholars over the last decades. With the huge scale and complexity of this system, it is essential to grasp the system from the different perspectives. This paper contributes to the literature by three folds as follow. First, conducting a critical and exhaustive literature review for the management aspects, philosophies and approaches of the supply chain of milled grain products. The literature is classified from different perspectives, including: the conceptual modelling approaches for representing the system; the simulation modelling approaches imitating the system; the purpose of the different studies conducted in the supply chain of milled grain products; and the aspects, factors and issues raised in the previous studies. Second, identifying the potential research directions in the management problems of the supply chain of milled grain products. Third, developing a research framework for the most critical issues raised in the supply chain of milled grain products. The study framework recommends the integration of both flow charts and Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) methodology in order to describe system components and conceptual modelling. Furthermore, the framework will be extended to adapt System Dynamics for studying the interrelationships between the system components and investigate the dynamic behavior of the entire system. The system dynamics model will merge the four sub-systems and study the behavior of each components represented on the chart. The main findings of this paper are as follow. First, there is a shortage in the studies focusing on conceptual representation of the supply chain of milled grain products. For this point, efficient conceptual modelling approaches such as Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) approach could be applied. Second, there is a need for a high-level modelling and simulation of the behavior of such complex system where all four-subsystem studied in detail. For this point, a system dynamics-based set of models could be integrated to simulate the interrelated subsystems as well as investigating the relationship between the components and their influence towards each other. Furthermore, the impact of a set of variables, such as the climate change, inflation, and oil price on the food shelf price could be analyzed using system dynamics-based models.