There are a number of international and national projects focusing on the specification, development and implementation of improved, often electronic, food traceability systems.
A common feature in many of these projects is the need for analysis and documentation of existing practice related to material flow, information flow, use of identifiers, documentation of transformations and systematic information loss in the industry pilots. A number of methods exist, both for the actual process mapping and for the documentation of the results (visualization of the flow and the dependencies).
Another common feature of many of the food traceability R&D projects is the need to describe and hopefully quantify the cost and the benefit related to the implementation of new (electronic) traceability systems in the chosen pilots.
The cost/benefit analysis can be done before implementation of the new system as an aid to decision making (expected benefits then being predicted).
Alternatively, the cost/benefit analysis can be done after implementation of the new system when the changes are known, and the "Return On Investment" can be calculated more accurately.
The need for method development, refinement and harmonization in these two areas has become fairly clear. Harmonized methods are needed if we want comparable results between the projects, and especially if we want to build up a formal or informal body of knowledge related to common challenges, solutions and typical real-life costs and benefits.
Unfortunately, little research has been done in this area, and there are only few formally described methods or scientific publications in this area.
This is an invitation to present and future users of methods like the ones described above to try to alleviate this problem. Note that the invitation is for a workshop, so every organization attending should be prepared to present the methods they use / intend to use, also results obtained.
A detailed workshop agenda will be presented when we know more details about participants and methods being presented, and it will include presentation of existing methods and case studies, discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the existing methods, suggested improvements, possibility for merging existing methods, possibility for harmonization of method use, possibility for developing a common methods toolbox, publication, etc.
This workshop was initiated by the EU 6FP TRACE project in conjunction with the EU 6FP TRACEBACK and Chill-On projects, but it is open for other interested and active parties.
Invitation document