Abstract—India, being the second-biggest maker of numerous foods grown from the ground, faces plenty of difficulties and issues in its agri-supply chain. Delivery performance has become a critical issue in the current situation of agri-business in India in various food processing (FP) SMEs due to the high perishability of the products involved. The unpredictable demand in the Indian commercial food business, particularly in the fruits and vegetables (F&V) sector on both local and foreign markets, is leading to delivery problems, intense rivalry, and a loss of customers and high-quality production. The study aims to describe the parameters affecting delivery performance in Indian FP SMEs as of today; FP SMEs are interested to become on-time delivery (OTD) efficient. The purpose of this work is to analyze the delivery parameters by which these FP SMEs should achieve on-time delivery in the F&V sector supply chain and to determine the most critical parameters through an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model considering the supply chain used in three different food processing SMEs, namely FP SME-1, FP SME-2, FP SME-3. A poll-based study system is utilized and the responses were taken from experts inthe Indian food industry, further an AHP model is established. Nine parameters are set up from literature, descriptive research, and conducting interview sessions with managers, supervisors, store heads, and retailers in the Indian F&V sector.

A methodology is proposed using AHP, based on criteria weights, relative priorities, and rankings for the fruits and vegetable sector in India. These parameters show that the delivery performance is highly affected by changes or impacts on these parameters. It is suggested that more food processing SMEs in India should focus on these delivery parameters to achieve On-Time Delivery in the competitive market. This investigation proves that FP SME-2 is more responsive towards delivery performance improvement w.r.t other FP SMEs. It is suggested that every FP SME dealing with the F&V sector should adopt delivery performance improvement to achieve opportunism in the global market. This examination gives a solidified way to deal with recognising, breaking down, assessing, and prioritising the delivery affecting parameters delivery in the F&V sector of the Indian supply chain.

Keywords—Analytic Hierarchy Process, delivery performance, delivery improvement, fruits & vegetable sector, Indian food processing SMEs, on-time delivery, perishable supply chain