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

ICT Leap-frogging Enabled by Cloud Computing for Emerging Economies: A Case Study on Streamlining India's Grain Supply Chains

“…Concomitant with the unnecessary distance traveled are the unnecessary fuel burn, the resulting environmental impact, traffic congestion, and all the negative consequences associated with the congestion. We conducted a study to demonstrate that a distribution system consisting of four small "sub-hubs" could drastically reduce the total distance traveled by the distribution trucks and reported the findings in [4]. In the rest of this section, we briefly summarize the findings.…”

“…Together with other improvements in supply-chain operations, particularly the concept of "consumer visible" branding, this layer of intermediaries can be drastically reduced in importance or even completely eliminated, hence significantly reducing the supply-chain costs. In addition to cloud computing and branding, the solution we proposed in [4] to help reduce the cost of the supply chains between wholesalers and consumers has another pillar -distributed hubbing for drastically reducing the distribution cost. Unlike how cloud computing is used in developed nations [1,2], the two primary benefits of cloud computing for streamlining India"s grain supply chains and improving the operations of many other systems in emerging economies are about the access to computing, not about the computing that can be performed in the cloud.…”

“…Although cloud-computing researchers have expressed the opinion that emerging economies can benefit from cloud computing, they tended to seek general application areas for cloud computing, e.g., government services, or suggested further development of technologies, e.g., voice-enabled web portal, that may facilitate the adoption of cloud computing by emerging economies [3]. We have had an entirely different motivation -to streamline and improve India"s grain supply chain and, in the process, discovered that cloud computing is a promising technology for solving a key part of the problem [4].…”

“…Spoilage rates in these supply chains have been consistently estimated to be between 25% and 30%, with their developednation counterparts being approximately 3% [3,4]. The rates of price "mark-up," i.e., service charges over crop costs, have been estimated to be over 240%, with their counterparts in developed nations being between 50% and 100% [3,4].…”

“…We focus on the portion of the supply chains between the wholesalers and the consumers, and this portion accounts for a whopping 210% of the 240% overall price mark-up [3,4].…”