Supply Chain Frontiers issue #38
The huge cost of building the logistics and distribution infrastructures required to support low-income, high-volume markets often deters businesses from expanding in these areas. As a result, the markets remain underserved and companies are unable to capitalize on important growth opportunities. The MIT m-Logistics Initiative has been created to unlock these markets through the use of mobile communications technology.
The m-Logistics Initiative is based at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (MIT CTL). Its mission is to understand the basic commercial processes – such as pricing, transaction and procurement mechanisms - in resource-constrained environments, and to design and deploy a mobile software platform that can enable industry partners to distribute their products to low-income markets with substantially lower overhead.
The technology that underpins this mission is developing rapidly. Within the next three years another billion people will make regular use of cell phones, continuing the fastest adoption of a new technology in history. By 2012, mobile technologies will be used by five billion people, most of them in underserved regions.
Moreover, the advent of Smartphone and tablet computing platforms has advanced the power and functionality of mobile devices exponentially. As a result, individuals are now able to carry handheld personal computers that are always connected to a communications network.
These devices will soon be adopted on a mass scale in developed markets, and quickly thereafter in emerging markets, as has been the case with previous generations of mobile devices. The opportunity lies in transforming the technology from a primarily voice-based medium into an interactive, data-intensive platform for real-time personal coordination and collaboration. Harnessing mobile technology in this way will bring logistics-efficient commerce at the individual consumer level within reach, and open up low-income markets to the business community.
For more information on the MIT m-Logistics Initiative and its research work contact Jhonatan Rotberg, Lecturer, MIT Engineering Systems Division, at email: jrotberg@mit.edu, or telephone: 617-715-4492.