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Pablo José Arévalo Chávez

(iv) Require commitment from whole multi-tier sup-

ply chain network. 

(v) Require availability of information and com-

pany’s documents. 

(vi) Availability of time - the purchasing manager 

comment that, “ In order to apply the entire 
framework, 2 months were required…”.

Conclusion

The globalisation and the fast improvement in high 
quality products have brought high level of market 
pressure to the companies. The global sourcing 
providers of food and ingredients are growing fast. 
Consequently the number of agents involved in the 
supply chain network is increased, making supply 
chain quality management very difficult. For this rea-
son companies have more delay points and greater 
uncertainties. Today more coordination, communi-
cation and monitoring are required for firms. The 
clear problem is that even a minor incident in one 
part of a supply chain can have disastrous effects 
in other parts of the supply chain network. So sup-
pliers are providing components (or materials) that 
are not meeting quality specifications. A series of 
company scandals, reputation and recall products 
and cost are hitting the food industry. 

The companies are being forced to modify their old 
operations management methods, and develop 
better systems to guarantee that customers are 
satisfied with the products. 

The concept of Food quality risk is not been deeply 
investigated, especially in the product quality risks 
along the supply chain network. PQR in supply chain 
is focus on the quality problems in the multi-tier 
supplier context in which a minor incident can have 
a cumulative effect along the whole network. 

Even though there are many risk management op-
tions which are aimed to reduce risk, it should be 
noted that there is not any framework that propose 
an accurate approach in which all the members 
should work together to mitigate the effects of 
these risks. Matook et al. [11] proposed a supplier 
risk management framework which aims to improve 
the entire risk management process through se-

quential form of 5 stages. However, this approach 
is focus on in general in the supplier’s risk without 
considerate the product quality. 

There are many concepts of quality and are de-
pending on the actor who is acquiring the product 
along the supply chain. Bozarth and Handfield [10] 
affirmed and proposed that quality can be defined 
according to the value and conformance perspec-
tive. Thus, they suggested four points to achieve 
high-quality products and services to customers. 

Roth et al. [12] proposed a conceptual framework 
for supply chain quality management called the 
“six Ts” which are traceability, transparency, test-
ability, time, trust and training. According to him, it 
can applied to any supply chain. These six Ts are 
critical associated with product quality. 

In order to assess PQR, a case study research had 
been designed. The case study was carried out 
in a Central America food product distributor, EL 
Mundo. The data was collected by using interviews 
and questionnaire approaches. The semi-structure 
interview aimed to identify most relevant risk types 
and drivers along the supply chain. 

During the adoption of the risk management frame-
work, company’s issues related with the quality risk 
along multi-tier network were exposed, and actions 
plans were proposed. However, the proposed risk 
management framework is not a tool to mitigate 
the risk, it is a process which provides and exposed 
the all the issues related with product quality risk. 
As a result the exposed of organisational incidents 
should reduce in the near future. The application 
of quantitative methods to measure the quality 
risk should be considered for further research. 
The analysis of the case study was complicated 
since it was made from different country without 
any company visit during the evaluation time. Due 
to information delays in the interviews and surveys, 
it was proved to be very hard the data collection 
process. 

The analysis of the case is limited since it was 
the only that it was used to examine the risk man-
agement framework. The outcome would be more 
interesting if the proposed framework is applying 
to more cases studies.