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Introduction
Over the last decade, food supply chain stakeholders have been implementing real-time data collection, enabling them to record, verify and track a product's entire history through the length of the supply chain. Industry managers, who work in fresh food supply chains, visualise how relevant and valuable food quality is through an effective supply chain management (Siddh et al., 2020).
Senior management in the Australian food industry is aware of the potential benefits of the application of real-time data to transform their business operations by reducing food fraud, improving food safety, increasing food supply chain efficiency, reducing food loss and providing transparency for their customers. As claimed by Prakash et al. (2017) there is a need for further research into perishable food supply chains (PFSC) in order to identify strategies for improving traceability and recall procedures.
A current challenge for the Australian food industry is to switch from gathering and analysing data of past events into collecting real-time data, delivering insights on what is happening in real-time in the food supply chain, and ideally using these insights to react accordingly. Real-time traceability can play a critical role in improving the performance of PFSC (Zhang et al., 2017) and according to Bag et al. (2020) a key advantage is the availability of multiple data sources. The data that are currently being collected could help companies to make more efficient operational decisions in less time with clear benefits for their business.
Leading information technologies promote the use of real-time data (Villalobos et al., 2019) not just to provide visibility of the resources that are moved within the food supply chain, but to offer speed and other competitive advantages that improve real-time decision-making. Technological advances mean that important business decisions are evolving from on-demand information into a continuous information flow to deliver insights or make decisions under critical conditions.
Australian agri-food technology solution providers are looking for more efficient ways to analyse real-time data to improve customer service levels and achieve higher revenues. The goal is to obtain real-time condensed information, analysed and readable, that could enhance business operations. Using real-time data to achieve agility could increase business performance and profits. Supply chain practitioners often make decisions guided, not by tools and models, but by...