South African Workshop Presentations
Two Visibility Workshops have been held on the 28 – 30 January 2010 and 2-4 March 2011 and a Partner & Training Workshop on the 15 – 22 March 2013.
2.2 Abstracts of South African Workshop (March 2011)
2.2.5 Lessons from the sugarcane supply chain: What we need to consider when configuring large industrial commodity supply chains?
Presenter:
Carel Bezuidenhout
University of Kwazulu Natal
Bounded rationality and complexity are deemed to be important factors that will determine hard system solutions in any agri-type supply chain, including bio-fuels. In my presentation I will unpack this concept further and will provide examples of research tools and solutions that we have applied in the sugar industry to deal with messy problems. These include cause-and-effect mapping and connectivity graphs. Other tools that may come in handy in bio-fuel supply chain and logistics research are, TRIZ, Soft Systems Methodology, Game Theory, the Theory of Constraints, Metamodelling and Ontologies. The presenter also unpacks the different drivers and components of agricultural-based supply chains and will illustrate examples of our research in the sugar industry. Although none of this work was originally done in a bio-fuel context, little evidence exists to suggest that these principles will not be exactly the same, if not more complex.
