23 Dec 2012

Custodians missing in the Cold-chain

Looking ahead into 2013, the expectations from market and service providers are quite obvious to conclude. The Previous year has established that manufacturers and marketers will continue to push to outsource both critical and non-critical areas in logistics to ease working capital pressure on their company.

Yet, are the LSPs prepared and professional enough to match this opportunity? It will require innovative organisational leadership in finance and operations. The typical response though, is to reduce head count and fixed warehouse & transportation assets while maintaining service (exactly what their client company did by outsourcing their own requirement). LSPs need to respond otherwise and not play in tandem. Besides, maintaining service with lowered asset base means opening up to risk, or alternately requires another kind of asset – technology! The smart ones will manage; there will be intelligent contingency plans, back-haul network redesigning, productivity realignments and a move from transactional to strategic management and control.

India’s logistics sector usually has a limited outlook when projecting into the future. This is largely because of the gap in associated infrastructure and matching processes, thereby never allowing them to be truly ahead of the development curve.