Streamlining grain supply chains of India: Cloud computing and distributed hubbing for wholesale-retail logistics

Author

Tsao, H. S Jacob ; Parikh, Shrikant ; Ghosh, Anindya S. ; Pal, Ritesh ; Ranalkar, Madhura ; Tarapore, Hanoz ; Venkatsubramanyan, Shailaja

Author_Institution

Dept. of Ind. & Syst. Eng., San Jose State Univ., San Jose, CA, USA

fYear

2010

Firstpage

252

Lastpage

257

Abstract

Spoilage rates in India´s grain supply chains have been estimated to be 25% to 30%. The price “mark-up” rates, i.e., service charges over crop costs, have been estimated to be over 240%, with a whopping 210% incurred by wholesalers, retailers and the intermediaries. The two rates in developed nations are approximately 3% and between 50% and 100%. This paper focuses on supply-chain portion from wholesalers through consumers and proposes service, information technology and logistics concepts to help reduce the two rates. In particular, cloud computing may help India bring the full benefit of IT to their small merchants through leap-frogging.

Keywords

Internet; agricultural products; customer services; logistics data processing; pricing; retailing; supply chains; wholesale data processing; India grain supply chains; cloud computing; consumer services; crop cost estimation; distributed hubbing; grain supply chain streamlining; information technology; price markup rates; service charges; spoilage rates; wholesale retail logistics; Bandwidth; Broadband communication;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Service Operations and Logistics and Informatics (SOLI), 2010 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Qingdao, Shandong

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-7118-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SOLI.2010.5551572

Filename

5551572