Placing the ‘right’ bait
Sharing the shipper’s perspective, Jatinder Panjwani, AVP – Logistics, Micromax talks about the challenges and opportunities of the mobile logistics sector.
Can you enumerate the logistical challenges of the sector?
Commitment and safety are the priorities of today’s logistics world. Gone those days where logistics team members use to talk only about the cost effectiveness. Today, people from various part of world are concern about safely delivery with committed TAT (turnaround time). There are lots of commitments over cost and everyone today talks about cost to get the business. However, the pain area today is to get the cost mapped up with safely delivery of stocks from one point to another. We’ve faced issues related to cost match up, but, partner can’t deliver material without getting damaged or pilferage. Ideally, few vendors have started taking help from technology like really time tracking, GPS installation, MIS from complete movement. This really helps to take care customer problem at different stages. Where is the Indian mobile phone logistics heading? The complete world of mobile phones is getting changed be it from trading to manufacturing into India. This is a good sign of growth not only from industry prospective but also from employment and other arenas of growth in the country. Considering the material movement earlier, this was restricted only to complete built units and this has change to open phones like SKD form of it.
There are various ways to handle such type of material, however, the basic understanding would remain same on cost, effective TAT and less pilferage of stocks. What is necessary to lessen the pilferages and damages during the movement?
Technology plays a vital role in all areas of material movement. There is a huge difference between known issues and unknown issues and tangible controls versus intangible controls. Therefore, if someone knows that material is fragile and with help of GPS tracking can reroute the complete movement would really support the less damage stocks movement to a great extent.
Similarly, when a driver gets pre-alerts during riots in some area which he is not aware and keep on driving the vehicle would lead to pilferage and other chaos to the material safety. How can a logistics service provider help?
Clarity on certain information and timely updates would lead logistics industry to a different tangent. More importantly, we have to focus on certain issues commitment to customer or in case if there are some changes, the same information without any hindrance must inform customer on time. This would lead to a different level of understanding between vendor and customer.