Infusing technology for better transportation

India’s agricultural sector is one of the biggest drivers of the country’s economic recovery and together with livestock, adding up to 25.6 per cent of total agricultural GDP. Despite the reliance on the cold chain to transport these perishable shipments has been incessantly growing in India; this sector is still highly unorganised and lacking behind. Amid the mounting challenges, temperature anomalies leading to shipment integrity is a major setback and can be collared with a well-implemented cold chain movement system that can result in a positive difference to the countries over-all GDP and create vast in employment opportunities.

Temperature-controlled transportation solutions for long-haul distribution of perishable products
Acknowledging the vast natural resources and diversity of landscape, tropical and cold climate farm produce, we should setup an integrated cold chain movement system as a whole taking advantage of our existing resources. Devyani Rai, Head of Products, Redcompass., suggests that It’s important that we consider having the followings:

• Develop a unified refrigerated container movement system
• Move all major transshipment hubs and manufacturing to the coastal areas
• Refrigerated container ships suitable to ply between all port of India along the west and East coast.
• Refrigerated containers to be transshipped in-land using the natural in-land water ways, dredge and develop our rivers to similar of – Rhine, Mississippi & Yangtse
• Transfer the same refrigerated containers on to our railways network for further inland delivery.
• To move valuable production possible in various mountainous regions to near coastal hubs for transshipment – for internal consumption and export.
• Leveraging the digital transformation, integration of emerging technologies such as IOT (Internet of Things) to farm produce can provide tracking and control the efficiency of the supply chain execution on real-time basis unleashing the full potential of utilising India’s lead in software and big data. Real time visibility and traceability can improve additional life-cycle sales, long-term in stability and predictability.

Effectiveness of Vehicle Tracking System (VTS) in cold chain industry
The Indian cold chain market is extremely fragmented due to which end to end supply chain movement involves prevalent mismanagement of logistics. At the helm of several operational issues in the logistic market, vehicle tracking has made an entry to fully transform the cold chain logistic industry and bring in rapid growth in the coming years. “In a bid to structure the transport industry, Government of India has made a substantial move by enforcing Automotive Industry Standard AIS-140, which has GPS/GSM trackers mandatory in all public service vehicles published by ARAI (Automotive Research Association of India). A much-needed change heaves a sigh of relief amongst the cold chain suppliers as they move towards making more margins on hauling and boosting their business. A telematics device running on mainly 3 technologies (GPS (Global Positioning System), RFID (Radio-frequency identification) and OBD (Onboard diagnostics) are fitted to the reefer coaches along with various environmental sensors and GPS sensors.” Says, Rai.

These IOT enabled devices promises to provide unparalleled realtime end-to-end cold-chain refrigerated container transportation data. Custom driven mobile app, capturing real-time visibility of both location and conditions such as information on vehicle in motion, elaborative map views, vehicle speed, geo fenced routes, engine start up and shut down, idling and non ascribed routes, fuel, preventive maintenance, insurance, vehicle’s life cycle, driver behavior etc. has a huge potential payoff, in the long run by streamlining processes with the help of automation. These government initiatives on supply chain management has opened up a huge B2B and OEM opportunity for Vehicle Tracking systems by providing opportunities to optimise the existing transport infrastructure and systems along with efficiency, quality, comfort and safety.

Devyani Rai, Head of Products, HVAC, Redcompass