Gis as a Decision Support for Supply Chain Management

A supply chain is a network of facilities and distribution options that performs the functions of procurement of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products, and the distribution of finished products to customers. Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the process of planning and management of materials, information and financial flow in a network consisting of manufacturers, distributors, suppliers and customers with the objective of reducing the costs, increasing the business and improving the customer service. GIS can be used as a tool to map manufacturing, clients, processing units, supplier locations, distribution centers, and routing of vehicles. GIS can be used as a decision support for effective supply chain management. In the system, the data of the processing units, the customers, the distribution centers, the suppliers, and the topologies of the roads are stored and managed by the geographic information system (GIS). Badaun district of western U.P. region is considered as the study area. The supply chain management is facilitated for the parag co-operative milk production units. The system will answer to the following queries of the user: What is the drive time from the central facility to any other location? How long will it take to reach delivery locations? Which customer will be in which service area? How can the goods be tracked through the supply chain? What will be the shortest route between two points in the supply chain network? What will be the alternative path between two points other than the normally followed shortest path? Finally a comparison between the supply chain network of parag co-operative milk production units and other private sector milk production units is performed and some changes are proposed on the bases of this comparison.