Achieving excellence in the things that matter in our lives

VALUE Chain Analysis (VCA) is a buzzword in government and private organizations these days. I often get invited to meetings organized by our department and other government agencies that carry the phrase.

Last week, the Philippine Rural Development Project of the Department of Agriculture (PRDP) invited me to attend a VCA consultation meeting for temperate vegetables at the Ecolodge Hotel and Restaurant inside the Resurrection Cathedral compound, along Magsaysay Road, Baguio City.

In the DA the phrase is usually attached to a commodity that suggests why a meeting, seminar or workshop is being undertaken with and for its beneficiaries.

By definition, a VCA is a strategic tool used to “analyze internal firm or industry activities, the goal of which is to recognize the most valuable activity and those that need to be improved to provide a competitive advantage to the organization.”

In a value chain consultation meeting for an agricultural commodity, participants that include key players from production, processing, and marketing will try to analyze the perceived existing value chain model together. They contribute their ideas and opinions about the current state and process of operations, the quality of services and inputs, how these are received at various stages of the production-marketing operation, infrastructures and facilities, and how these add value to agricultural services and products that are sold raw or processed for the market.

If you talk to those at the forefront of these activities, they would tell you they are gathering data from key players to formulate a value chain map. That simply is a restatement of why you want to do a VCA, that is, “to identify and analyze industry activities and those that need to be improved.”

The temperate vegetables included in the discussions for consideration in the development of a “VCA for Temperate Vegetables” are broccoli, carrots, sweet peas, cabbage, pole snap beans, bell pepper, lettuce, cauliflower, and Chinese cabbage.

The highly animated discussions brought out perceived problems, specific priority needs and possible solutions by the participant-stakeholders to include producers, traders, support service providers, input dealers, local government officials, and others.

I should say that the PRDP through its local Investments for Planning at the Local and National level (I-PLAN) component did a wonderful VCA exercise, one that will hopefully probe useful in planning at various levels and in responding to the problems affecting the industry by various actors advancing the interest and welfare of the local vegetable industry and its stakeholders.

Meantime, I felt that Ms. Susan Balanza, PRDP-CAR I-PLAN coordinator and her group selected a strategic venue for the conduct of this activity at the Ecolodge Hotel and Restaurant.

This may come as a pitch for the Ecolodge Hotel and the Health 101 Restaurant group, but it is a way of paying back their consistent support to our “BROWN4good” campaign in previous years. The campaign promoted the consumption of brown rice among Filipino consumers.

Local restaurants should help develop, promote and market healthy local products. This is why I have a high regard for the Health 101 Restaurant group with outlets in Baguio City and KM 5, La Trinidad, Benguet. Organic vegetables, fruits, brown rice, and coffee sourced raw from local producers and served in their best form in a local food outlet makes one appreciative and grateful to the farmers who try their best to feed the nation with good and quality food.

I do not personally know the owners of the Health 101 Restaurant group, but analyzing their food menu and services is to me an outcome of a VCA.

In a restaurant business, the chef is paid to take raw inputs and to "add value" to these materials by turning them into something of worth to other people. Visit a Health 101 Restaurant and find out what the chef did to a plain vegetable salad. It became a sumptuous meal with juice from fresh fruits or vegetables of your choice.

By adding value to the raw input (a plain salad of lettuce), the chef combined it with different vegetables, fruits, and other products of limited use to the end user and converting it to a final product that people are prepared to pay money for.

The idea does not only benefit the restaurant serving the product. Its benefits reverberate to the customer and all the way back to the producers and those involved in the supply chain.

That is the VCA in action. It pays to analyze our activities for the purpose of achieving excellence in the products of our services and businesses.