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NDFE (National Digital Freight Exchange) of India is a key initiative of SNP (Supply Network and Procurement Forum) of the CII (Confederation of Indian Industry). The initiative takes inspiration from the Prime Minister’s Gati Shakti - National Master Plan for Multi-modal Connectivity for integrated planning and coordinated implementation of infrastructure connectivity projects.
It is hard to understate the importance of supply chain efficiency for large and growing economies, particularly India. An efficient and sustainable supply chain management system is one of the key factors for economic growth. An effective supply chain directly translates into competitiveness across economic sectors through lowered input costs.
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Trucks dominate transportation in India’s logistics sector. Establishing a more efficient freight network is one way to move towards reducing logistics costs from the current 13% of the GDP to a single-digit number .
The idea for the NDFE started with one goal: To consolidate national shipping demand on a digital platform in order to build a more efficient transportation network.
1. Predictive optimization technology to predict and optimize millions of loads and hundreds of thousands of trucks, allowing for carrier monitoring, improved freight rates, and visibility.
2. Ability to identify, create, and execute collaboration opportunities between carriers and shippers automatically without explicit coordination or change in processes required.
3. Ability to integrate with TMS systems for automated tendering, visibility, and invoicing, as well as email, document, and platform bots for extracting information and automating repetitive tasks.
4. Transparency through network-wide aggregated views across enterprises.
5. Create a more sustainable shipping network with fewer empty miles, a reduced carbon footprint, and access to reliable capacity and predictable rates.
To identify the potential of aggregating shipping demand on a single digital platform, historical shipment data from major enterprise shippers was collected from Forum members including Asian Paints, Godrej, P&G, Kellogg’s, Kimberly-Clark, PepsiCo, Nestle, Whirlpool, and several others.
A Network Assessment was then completed by SemiCab. This assessment included network simulation and optimization to establish complementary lanes and efficiencies.
From a total of 6,000 lanes that included 500,000 loads covering 24 million miles, the potential efficiencies identified were astounding. Over 50% of the lanes and loads could be potentially optimized, resulting in less than 10% empty miles across the network.
CII-SNP Forum Members are convinced the NDFE is the way forward and nearly all Network Assessment participants are moving ahead with SemiCab. While the technology provided by SemiCab is proving to be critical to the success of the NDFE, none of this would be possible without India’s Unified Logistics Interface Platform.