Building digital skills

2018 is sure to be a year of transformation, with significant opportunity for logistics managers to position themselves for success through proactive renovation of the operational processes. Operational excellence, particularly in the areas of technological adoption and cost realignment, will be central to the goal of executing through disruption.

“Businesses are counting on new hires to bring fresh insights on how leading edge technologies can be used in their companies. Seasoned employees expect the new hires to bring different perspectives that will help them drive change and build new capabilities. However, the bar for hiring the new employee is set even higher - not only are they expected to know the technology but in many cases, companies want them to know and truly understand the business.

As such, new hires need to focus ways to use digital to delivery new levels of supply chain performance. In addition to new hires, businesses are looking to improve the skill set of their current employees and many are investing in building digital skills

Regards

DR.N.K.ARORA
Expert & Senior Consultant
Warehousing,Logistics&Supply Chain Management
PUNE

Major reasons of food grain wastage in India

A study once represented that a quantity of wheat equivalent to the entire production of Australia goes to waste each year in India. Rs. 44,000 crore is the value of food grains wasted in India every year.What’s more, the food grain wastage value is 150 per cent of India’s budget allocation on agriculture. While many of us may raise eye brows on these statistics, unfortunately these have not moved our law makers. While the parliament and media have more than engaged themselves on a question of Rs. 288,000 crore spent on Food Security bill, unfortunately, they have not shown even a fraction of seriousness towards yearly loss of Rs. 44,000 crore due to food wastage. Stopping the food wastage should be the preamble of the food security of the country.

The problem of food wastage is not new. Food Corporation of India has admitted of food grain wastage of 79 million tonnes between 2009 and 2013. India produces about 260 million tonnes of food grain every year including wheat, rice, pulses and cereals. Rice has the major share (105 million tonnes), in it, followed by wheat (95 million tonnes), cereals (42 million tonnes) and pulses of (18 million tonnes). Farmers them-selves store about 70 per cent of the produce on their own and 30 per cent is procured by the government through different schemes for storage and public distribution. While the storage by farmers suffers a wastage of 6 per cent due to rodents, insects and fungi, surprisingly the wastage is about 30 per cent when the food grain is stored by FCI and state warehouses. lt’s surprising that the highest wastage occurs in the so-called developed states of Gujarat, West Bengal,Punjab, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand. FCI and State Warehousing Corporations together hold a storage capacity of only 70 million tonnes, whereas food grains procured every year exceed 80 million tonnes, creating a shortfall of about I0 million tonnes. An addition of emergency stock requirement of l0 per cent widens this gap to 20 million tonnes. While the average capacity of a facility is 20,000 tonnes, many of the FCI storage facilities are set up in open sky, making it easy for the grain to rot!

In the age of technology today, one is able to predict the consumer behaviour with minimal failures. Then, how come we are not able to predict the actual demand vs procurement of grains? Wrong estimates result in extra procurement, thus making FCI an official hoarder. Non-adoption of FIFO (first in, first out) principle further adds to this massive wastage. The solution is to develop an integrated software application linking overall production, demand, procurement and storage, keeping in view the associated regions and infrastructure available. The system will create most optimal location network of grain storage, minimizing travel distance for storage as well as final distribution. Such integrated software system is the key to building an efficient grain storage network. The financial institutions, technology, consumer markets and infrastructure move along with structure of society. The change of joint family to nuclear families has forced these to change from hub 8r spoke model to distributed architecture. Therefore, rather than one big bank, we now have thousands of ATMs; intelligence is stored in clouds rather than in one big computer; and home deliveries take care of our requirements, instead of one big shop.Similarly, the grain storage infrastructure architecture also needs to change. From several hundred big storage spaces, the architecture needs to move into several thousand small go- downs close to farmers and distribution spots.

The second intervention of technology is needed in the storage infrastructure itself. Today, new-technology steel silos and silo bags are available, whereby the life and safety of grain are enhancedmultiple times by creating modified atmosphere of low oxygen and high CO2. Through these technologies, one can create smaller storage of 2,000 tonnes per bag next to farmers, taking only 1/10th of an acre of land. It is the most chronic supply chain problem ever. It is time to get the perspectives right and implement solutions by supply chain professionals!

DR.N.K.ARORA
http://www.drarorawarehousing.co.in

strong increase in the containerization of maritime cargo in India.

The growing share of container tonnages shows there is a strong increase in the containerization of maritime cargo in India.
Evolution in Shares of Different Types of Cargo It is important to consider the development of different types of cargo because this will impact the ports and the ports policy in terms of required facilities, infrastructure, superstructure and equipment. The shares of major commodities  for five major commodity groups. Petroleum, Oil and   Lubricants (POL) declined from 41 percent to 37 percent of total tonnage, whereas coal increased in share from 13 percent to 15 percent. Iron ore reduced from 19 percent to 15 percent. The share of other commodities, which includes for example fertilizers, but also general and break-bulk cargo, has decreased from 23 percent to 17 percent. The share of containerized tonnage shows a large increase from 4 percent to 16 percent. The growing share of container tonnages shows there is a strong increase in the containerization of maritime cargo in India. This is an encouraging sign of the increased integration of the Indian supply chains and trade networks to the global container transport networks.

Regards
DR.N.K.ARORA
Expert & Senior Consultant
Warehousing,Logistics&Supply Chain Management
PUNE
23.3.2016

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