- A study in the Swedish bread and bakery manufacturing industry

Are you having difficulties to meet current customer demands and respond to the turbulent and fast-changing markets of today? Do you need a framework that supports digital information management and data-driven decision-making? Don’t worry, we have developed it for you.

Digital information management is crucial for a food manufacturing company as it increases productivity, lowers cost, and enables traceability as well as data-driven decision-making. A lack of information management could lead to consequences for organizations such as lack of customer demand and requirements, which could result in high inventory or stockout. By adapting to new digital platforms and digital technologies, companies will be able to meet current customer demands and respond to the turbulent and fast-changing markets of today. Digitalizing the information sharing between actors in the value chain can also facilitate for managers to make the right decisions, particularly when it is data-driven.

The study was performed with a Swedish bread and bakery manufacturing company, where the three relevant actors Production, Warehouse and Distribution were studied. The purpose of this study was to enable digitalized information management in food value chains, with the aim to increase understanding of which information that needs to be considered for data-driven decision-making and which parts to digitalize in the value chain. The result of the study is a framework that supports digitalized information management and data-driven decision-making, that can be valuable for organizations to consider when starting a journey towards digitalized information management. The framework consists of six steps that take into consideration the collection of data, analysis of data, sharing of information, decision making, implementation, and feedback. The framework can be seen as a loop, which allows for continuous improvements.