The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Offer to computerise relief logistics

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, May 21, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Offer to computerise relief logistics

CHENNAI: : A logistics company in the United States specialising in the use of advanced technologies in inventory management has offered to help agencies in Tamil Nadu handle tsunami relief in an efficient manner.

Huge quantities of relief for those affected by the tsunami have come from different agencies and it is a challenge for distribution units to keep track of the supplies and channelise them to those who need them most.

IC Logistics of St. Louis, Missouri has offered its expertise to computerise information on the available relief materials and host it in different formats on the Internet, to enable multiple agencies to keep track of the operations.

The Chief Executive Officer of IC Logistics, John Clendenin, said in Chennai on Friday that his company had held discussions with the Tamil Nadu Government and the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, among others, on implementing the system.

The U.S. firm would offer its software on a laptop powered by solar panels in a rural setting where the relief distribution was to be done.

The data on the relief materials would be hosted on the web in multiple formats to make it accessible to multiple aid agencies, using a satellite link.

The company also had the option of trying out biometric devices (such as fingerprint recognition) to maintain delivery records.

Prof. Clendenin, who is on the faculty of the Harvard Business School, told industry representatives at a meeting organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) that advanced technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) were ideal to handle such complex tasks as disaster relief, where aid poured in continuously from multiple agencies and there was no infrastructure available to manage it.

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