“Tech Adoption in Oxygen Supply Chain Could Have Prevented Present Crises”

As the country is witnessing a drastic shortage of Medical Oxygen across various hospitals, nursing homes and households due to an upsurge in Covid-19 infected patients, Tech. Analyst firm ‘5Jewels Research’ believes that through proper Digitization and IT (Information Technology) Adoption in Oxygen Supply Chain, India could have prevented present oxygen crises. As per 5Jewels Research’s perspective, the state of technology and automation adoption in the Medical Oxygen Supply Chain is at a minimum level in the country, due to which supply, distribution, and consumption points are not fully integrated, making it a fragment, unpredictable and highly unstructured supply chain, particularly at the distribution end.

 Chief Analyst of ‘5 Jewels Research’, Mr. Sumant Parimal, a Globally recognized Tech. Analyst, while commenting on the present Medical Oxygen availability crises has said “Present Oxygen scarcity in India subsequent to Covid-19’s second wave is not a pure-play supply-demand problem, but it is also supply chain efficiency and performance problem, as digitization and automation adoption level in this sector, particularly in distribution and consumption side of medical oxygen industry segment, is at a lower level compared to what we see in other highly Tech. enabled industries like Retail, Banking and Financial Services. Had these critical oxygen supply chains would have been digitized and automated fully by using the latest digital Technologies, like A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), IoT (Internet of Things), Blockchains, and other digital platforms in past few years, then present-day crises could have been prevented to a larger extent”.

“We need to deploy A.I. based demand-supply models for the medical oxygen industry segment linked with advanced public health scenario modeling and prediction models, which generates supply, distribution and consumption schedules in advance to avert any last moment availability crises of oxygen, what we are witnessing today in India” Mr. Sumant Parimal said further in his observation.

“It is evident that better Tech. enabled countries like US and China, did better management of oxygen supply chain during Covid -19 outbreak, due to which oxygen supply chain disruptions in hospitals and households of those countries were at the lower end compared to lower digitized economies of Asia and Africa” Mr Sumant said further while sharing his further industry perspective.

Oxygen supply chain comprises of huge logistics efforts in transportation, packaging, un-packaging, re-packaging in different storage vessel formats and mediums which includes liquid oxygen to gaseous oxygen transformation, and involves inventory management of various types of filled and empty containers and cylinders, hence increases complexity in supply chain management, thus needs to be structured processes and Technology-driven to reduce point of failures and bottlenecks.