Assessment, Modelling, and Optimization of Efficiency in Rice Supply Chain from a Farmer’s Perspective: Study of Rice Supply Chain in India

Agriculture has been the backbone of most of the developing nations, but inefficiencies in agri-food supply chains, lead to poor economy and poverty. In order to appraise the success of supply chains, an adequate efficiency measurement system is needed to be developed. In this investigation cost of production, cost of distribution, cost of transaction, profit, return on invest and inventory have been taken as the measures of efficiency. Varieties of rice, requirement level and farmer types has been considered as the process parameters to supply chain efficiency. In this paper the variation of different aspects of efficiency as well as efficiency with respect to various input parameters of rice supply chain has been studied and demonstrated efficiently. Furthermore, an innovative application of statistical tool, analysis of variance with the integration of principal component analysis for chalking out the significance, percentage contribution and optimal process parameter setting has been implemented successfully.