NEC and DMIC Trust form JV to provide logistics visualization services in India

NEC Corporation  and the DMIC Trust have established a joint venture company, DMICDC Logistics Data Services Limited, for providing logistics visualization services in India. NEC and DMIC Trust will each hold 50% of the joint venture’s total capital of approximately 8 million Indian Rupees (INR).

This is the first commercial project to originate from the Smart Community initiatives of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor, which is being promoted jointly by the Indian and Japanese governments. Since 2010, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has played a key role in helping NEC and DMIC Trust to establish this new company.

The new company will provide shippers and transport operators with logistics visualization services, enabling them to perform real-time searches based on accurate positional information, showing the location of containers being transported by rail or road between Delhi and Mumbai. This will make significant contributions to shortening shipping lead times, reducing inventory levels and improving the accuracy of production plans.

To provide these services, the new company will affix RFID tags to shipping containers being loaded and unloaded at ports in Mumbai. It will also install RFID reader/writers at locations such as port entrances and exits, toll plazas on the expressway between Delhi and Mumbai, and inland container depots where customs inspections are carried out and cargo reloaded. Positional information obtained by RFID reader/writers will then be gathered in real time via a cloud-based logistics visualization system. There are plans to link up the logistics visualization system with rail transit management systems, port management systems and other existing systems in the future, in order to gather information such as freight train running times and container management status at the port.

“Development of logistics infrastructure in India is struggling to keep pace with the country’s rapid economic growth, causing issues such as longer shipping lead times and delays, and difficulties checking progress with goods in transit,” said Hiroshi Hashimoto, General Manager, Transportation and Logistics Solutions Division, NEC Corporation. “We are aiming to establish advanced logistics infrastructure in India through this new company, in order to contribute to the country’s economic development and to the Indian government’s key economic policy ‘Make in India’.”

“This project will enable quicker decision making that improves competitiveness of logistics and manufacturing industries in India, and also will provide better governance and complete transparent and visible management for performance evaluation of ports, inland container depots and truckers,” said Alkesh Sharma, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, DMICDC and Chief Executive Officer, DMIC Trust.

The new company will utilize NEC’s “Logistics Visualization System” to develop and operate the necessary platforms to provide the logistics visualization services.

NEC’s Logistics Visualization System belongs to the lineup of NEC Global Enterprise Solutions, NEC's portfolio of continually upgraded and expanded solutions and services offered globally to enterprise customers in retail, distribution, manufacturing and other fields. NEC plans to build on experience and expertise from its initiatives in India to provide a range of solutions and services designed to help develop more advanced logistics infrastructure in the future, focusing particularly on Asian countries.