Railways supply chain goes digital

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu today launched the digital contract, a system of digitisation of railways' supply chain across all zones, to ensure greater transparency and ease of doing business.
The system digitises processes like bill submission, inspection, dispatches, receipt, bill passing, payments and warranty monitoring and enables use of analytics for increasing supply chain efficiencies in real time.
"The digital era is round the corner. All organisations that are not digitally compliant will become obsolete over a period of time and those who embrace it would be the real winner in the emerging situation," Prabhu said here after launching the system.

With 100 per cent e-tenders and e-auctions already assimilated into the system, railways is taking these initiatives to achieve seamless flow of material, finances and information.
Describing the launch of the digital contract as a "good beginning", he said: "We have decided to embrace greater possibilities of digitisation. There are many areas to work on it."
Railways has a vast supply chain to maintain, sustain and build its huge asset base, to run the system and provide transportation service which is safe, secure and efficient.

Prabhu said supply chain integration into digitisation system is a very important issue and railways has embarked on the most ambitious project of making it transparent and more efficient.

"Now we have technology to do this. So supply chain digitisation will go a long way to meet railways' target of greater transparency and ease of doing buisness," he said.
The minister said though procurement, tendering work contract and even disposal of scraps are also on digital platform, there will be always room for improvement.
We must develop a system to identify scrap at the right time, he said.
On the future course of action, he said: "Railways is currently working on enterprise resource planning for bringing all operations on one platform through digitisation. All functions will be digitised and over a period of time they will be integrated.