Title: IT enablement in sugar supply chain: an approach for farmers

Authors: Rupesh Kumar; Rajat Agrawal; Vinay Sharma

Addresses: The Sugar Technologists' Association of India, New Delhi, Plot No. 15, Third Floor, 301 Aggarwal Plaza, Community Centre, Okhla Phase-I, New Delhi-110020, India ' Department of Management Studies, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee-247667, Uttarakhand, India ' Department of Management Studies, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee-247667, Uttarakhand, India

Abstract: The study is to identify various issues at farmers' level on the basis of literature review and expert panel discussions for developing suitable relationship between them so that the facilitation of e-applications for optimising cane yield at farmer level can be made possible. A field survey was conducted for checking the relevance level of the identified issues at five-point Likert scale. A total of 30 sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, India were targeted to collect 120 responses from the managers to identify the issues in an unstructured way. For checking the scope of e-applications, a total of 243 respondents were collected randomly from 183 farmers and rest from 60 employees of IT companies who provide supply chain solutions. The result shows that all identified issues are developing positive relationships and provides suggestive IT solutions to them which will help in overall development of farmers involved in sugarcane production.

Keywords: supply chain management; SCM; information technology; sugarcane farmers; sugar mills; factor analysis; regression method; business performance; sugar supply chains; cane yield optimsation; India; IT solutions.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPSCM.2015.073770

International Journal of Business Performance and Supply Chain Modelling, 2015 Vol.7 No.4, pp.360 - 381

Received: 07 Nov 2013
Accepted: 10 Jun 2014

Published online: 22 Dec 2015 *

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