English abstract
According to the 2004/2005 agricultural census, there are an estimated 7.8 million date palm trees grown throughout the Sultanate, occupying about 50 percent of the planted area, employing a significant number of Omani people directly and indirectly. Despite this importance of dates, statistics shows that in 2006 the Sultanate ranked 9h in the world in dates production far behind its neighbors such as Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Pakistan In fact, dates production has been declining since 2001, the year that date production reached its highest level in the Sultanate in recent years. Export disincentives which include poor quality output, absence of a well coordinated supply chain and lack of aggressive export promotion, in addition to the 2002 to 2004 drought, have been widely recognized as leading reasons behind the decline in dates production. Among dates exporters in the world, Tunisia is leading in terms of export unit value and total export value, as a result, Tunisia is taken as a benchmark in this study.
The purpose of this study is therefore two fold. First, is to apply the benchmarking approach employed by Garcia et al (2004) to the dates export supply chain in Oman and Tunisia in order to identify gaps in the organizational and operational structures of the export supply chain in the two countries. Second, is to utilize the information generated (regarding the gaps) to put forward recommendations to improve Omani dates export supply chain. For the purpose of this study, the benchmarking measures were put into two groups, namely qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative group has three dimensions whereas the quantitative group has one dimension only. Each of the four dimensions is comprised of a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). It is these KPIs that are used to identify the gaps between Tunisia and Oman.
The Tunisian dates supply chain was used as the "Best Practice" or "Benchmark" since in many ways it is more advanced and efficient than the supply chain of other dates producing countries. The analysis required an audit of the export supply chains of both countries. The audit was executed by visiting the exporters in both countries to collect the required data through questionnaires. In total ten date exporters were interviewed, three of which were Omani and the remaining seven firms were Tunisian. Results from the benchmarking exercise were summarized in a spider-web diagrams to show at a glance multiple targets and gaps.
The results show that Tunisia is performing better than Oman in all the four dimensions. Evaluation of the differences (Gaps) in practices identified in this study will help Omani firms in reviving and improving the Oman date supply chain to levels that will hopefully exceed current leading players such as Tunisia. However, we must be aware that some of the practices that are feasible in Tunisia may not be feasible in Oman as there could be large variations in resource availability, degree of modernisation and market-orientation of Agri-food systems. A careful analysis of the findings should enable Oman policy makers and stakeholders to produce an Industry Action Plan to correct the gaps and take the lead.
