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K.V. Kurmanath

Hyderabad, Oct. 14 With the US clearing the air on nuclear fuel supplies to India, a key issue of supply chain management — pilferages — comes to the fore, with the prospect of consignment landing in the wrong hands. Though logistics and manufacturer companies have started using tracking systems, the $3-trillion supply chain industry still depends on technologies that mostly give a “rear view” of the losses, missing goods and pilferages as they happen.

Aankhen Inc, a California-based company, has come out with a product, IRIS (in context, real-time, intelligence services), which offers companies real-time tracking of their consignments using a combination of GPS and RFID.

“We will provide them with full visibility of the actual trail of consignments. The device, clamped on to the locking system of trucks and containers, will immediately send a message to the command centre if someone tries to tamper with the container or if the container gets lost at a wrong address,” Mr Subhash Chowdary, Chief Executive Officer of Aankhen, told Business Line.

Mr Subhash was here in connection with a two-day roundtable on Warehousing and Distribution Logistics in India, held at the Indian School of Business recently.

According to him, the logistics industry has mostly been depended on the solutions that would tell them about the losses at a later stage. “Our solution will improve the efficiencies and remove uncertainties in the supply chain by helping the users (both the supplier and the receiver) better management of their inventories.

We will show to our customers about the interruptions, if any, on Google Map,” he said.

The US receives 1.5 million containers (of 20-ft long) every month. Aankhen’s clients include Dow Chemicals (the US to India) and Sony and LG (to the US).

“Our solutions help the companies improve their financial, physical and information supply chains,” he said.

Aankhen is planning to set up offices in Hyderabad and China to offer maintenance services.

More Stories on : Software | Supply Chain Management

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