Supply Chain Management in Indian Railways: A Study of Barriers to IT-Enablement

Information technology (IT) is the most important driver of supply chain management (SCM) as it can be used to make supply chains more efficient and at the same time more responsive. For other drivers a tradeoff is required to be made between efficiency and responsiveness.

Indian Railways (IR) procure about Rs. 42, 0000 Crore worth of materials annually for operations, maintenance and production of rolling stocks (locomotives, coaches, wagons etc.). Although, Indian Railways has been pioneer in adoption of IT, its use in maintenance operations has been minimal. The maintenance/productions units spread all over India provide the backbone for train operations. However, there are some barriers in the implementation of a seamless IT enabled supply chain management in Indian Railways. These barriers not only influence one another but also adversely affect the IT-enablement of supply chain. The aim of this paper is to identify the barriers that significantly affect the IT-enablement of supply chain and further classify them into driving barriers (root of few more barriers) and dependent barriers (most influenced by the others) so as to provide insights to the management to systematically and effectively deal with these barriers by way of prioritization and formulation of appropriate strategy for the same.

Literature review, interviews/discussions with experts in Indian Railways, automobile industry and academia and use of interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach.

The results of the literature review, field study, interviews/discussions with experts and application of interpretive structural modeling (ISM) have been used to establish contextual relationships among these barriers and to identify the strategy, project and operational level barriers.

There is a lack of literature in the area of IT enablement of supply chains particularly with respect to Indian Railways. This paper provides a research in this area and identifies the barriers which have both high driving power and dependency and therefore need to be given more attention by the management.