Inland Logistics: Streamlining The Container Supply Chain

The tone for day-long deliberations was set at the inaugural session where industry leaders gave a clarion call to drive efficiencies using technology, make the distribution machinery efficient and put the customer in the first place in order to make our supply chains right

Making a welcome departure from the policy and infrastructure related issues that have been discussed in the past editions of Containers India, this year the mega summit brought the most controversial issue onto the center stage – “the cost of logistics.” Elaborating more on the topic Ramprasad, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, Maritime Gateway said, “When we started Containers India we were discussing several policy related issues such as Cabotage, need for more container terminals, movement of cargo – whether it is more towards the east side?, the mushrooming of CFSs - will it help the trade?, DPD and several issues. So when I look back at the transition that is happening in the discussions, this year’s topic in consultation with CSLA and other stakeholders, we finally arrived at the most important thing which even the government is discussing – the cost of logistics.” The first session focused on “Reducing cost – are we looking at the wrong tree?,” which essentially means that in our value chain every stakeholder is a service provider for other stakeholder and when it comes to the cost everybody says the other person is responsible for making logistics very costly, so the first session tried to demystify where the cost is actually getting escalated?

The second session was “Empowering the end customer,” how the industry is serving him and what kind of transparency service providers are providing? The third session discussed digitalisation. For the past couple of years digitalisation has been at the forefront in our sector. Several organisations are independently making efforts to bring digitalisation as an enabler for customer service.