From April 11 onwards, the Indian Railways will introduce a centralised digital contract system for releasing contracts and contract payments for its supply chains across all railway zones in India.
The online supply chain system, wherein 100 percent E-tenders and E-auctions are already integrated, is now readying to host the all-in-one flow of information related to finances and materials.
"This would be a step forward to have a centralised monitoring and ensure transparency in the contract disbursal and its payments. It would be a leap forward for us from the manner railway supply tenders are being addressed today," said A.K.Mittal, Member (Infrastructure), railway board.
"The system includes digitisation of processes like bill submission, inspection, dispatches, receipt, bill payments, warranty monitoring and enabling the use of analytics for increasing supply chain efficiencies in real time," said Mittal.
Railways minister Suresh Prabhu will be attending a day-long seminar on Tuesday that would highlight on the seamless implementation of the digital contracts system.
The conference envisages involving stakeholders including industries, financial institutions, internal customers of railways and inspecting agencies to create an efficient, responsive and transparent system.
"Digitisation of supply chain should be seen as a tool for generating efficiencies, reducing entry barriers and transaction costs and increasing transparency," said Mittal.
Railways maintain a vast supply chain to sustain and build its huge asset base, and to provide a safe, secure and efficient transportation to three crore travelling public daily.
Railways' supply chain involves a net order book of Rs 50,000 crore and involves 52,000 supply vendors and more than 2,500 scrap dealers who buy material from Indian railways across the country, to keep the system running.
Such digitisation is seen to be an enabler for use of analytics in decision-making, reduce inventories and reduce procurement cycle time, leading to reduced cost of products and services.
Earlier, Prabhu had highlighted the commitment of introducing a digitised contracts system, in his railway budget speech of 2016.
"We intend to usher into a new era by switching over to paperless contract management system, where not only the bids are invited online but the entire process leading to the award of a tender is also done electronically. We have completed the trial run for the above and intend to roll it out on all India basis in next financial year," Prabhu had said.
