Koordination in Food Supply Chains: Status quo und Potenziale IT-basierter Informationssysteme (English shop)

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The division-of-labour organisation of the food supply chain is advantageous in many respects. The production and trading stages are independent and can therefore adapt flexibly to dynamic market developments. In addition, competition at the horizontal level forces companies to minimise costs and drives innovation.
The weaknesses of this form of organisation lie above all in the limited scope for preventing opportunistic behaviour and for collectively aligning the actors along the value chain with one another. As a result of a lack of information transparency along the supply chain and of opportunism, food scandals have occurred with increasing frequency in recent times, entailing growing consumer uncertainty and image problems in the agri-food sector. Steering the chain exclusively via prices and quantities is evidently insufficient to meet the current requirements for sustainable food production. Holistic quality assurance and traceability systems as well as crisis management and animal welfare programmes can be implemented more quickly and efficiently if central coordination takes place along the supply chain. For this reason, research and practice have frequently called for a reorganisation of agribusiness into vertically integrated production systems. In the German meat industry, however, no such trend can be observed. Intense price competition forces a large proportion of the actors to retain coordination via the free market, which is more efficient for the production of standard qualities.
This dissertation therefore analyses the potential for improving coordination in food supply chains without fundamentally questioning the existing organisational structures. The focus of the study is on the currently much-criticised (red) meat industry, where coordination deficits are particularly evident, as the numerous meat scandals, among other things, demonstrate.