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Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives

Value Chains: Strategic Alliances for Improving Profitability

What is a Value Chain?

A value chain is a business model based on collaboration. An agri-food value chain is a partnership between producers, processors and marketers created to improve quality, increase efficiencies or develop and market differentiated products. Value chains allow members to be more competitive by seeking market opportunities and linking production.and processing requirements to meet consumer demand.

The goal of a value chain is increased profits for all value chain partners, as they capitalize on market opportunities and deliver a quality product that consumers demand.

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Comparison between a value chain and traditional business relationships:

Business Component

Value Chain

Traditional

Communication

Extensive

Little or none

Value Focus

Value/Quality

Cost/Price

Product

Differentiated product

Commodity

System Driver

Consumer Pull

Production Push

Organizational Structure

Interdependant

Independant

Business Relationships

Collaborative

Adversarial

Source of Supply

Known and Traceable

Anonymous

Source of Risk

Relationships

Market and Price

How a Value Chain can Help Your Business:

  • Increase efficiencies
  • Reduce costs
  • Consistency of supply
  • Market differentiation
  • Increase food traceability
  • Knowledge and information sharing
  • Build and strengthen relationships
  • Reduce and share risk
  • Increase profitability
  • Competitiveness

Growing Your Profitability Through Value Chain Management Workbook

The purpose of the “Growing your Profitability through Value Chain Management” workbook is to assist you in identifying opportunities to improve the competitiveness of your business.

Free Downloadable Resource

This workbook follows the Lean/Six Sigma methodology which has successfully guided improvements and delivered proven results across many sectors, including agri-food. It achieves this by using value chain knowledge, data and facts as the basis of designing and implementing improvements. The tools are broken into a number of logical phases, with a focus on the customer or consumer.

The five phases are:

  • Define
  • Measure
  • Analyze
  • Improve
  • Control

To help you systematically identify and implement improvements, the workbook has been designed so it can be completed for an individual business (whether a farm, a processor, a retailer, etc.), for part of a value chain, or for an entire value chain.

Value Chain Resource Links

Value Chain Videos

 

For further information contact:

                       Annette Allen
                       Business Development Specialist – Value Chains
                       Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives
                       Phone: 204-937-7030
                       Email: Annette.allen@gov.mb.ca