NEW DELHI, July 15: Commerce secretary PP Prabhu on Tuesday urged the business community to adopt the concept of article numbering, bar coding and electronic data interchange (EDI) as a pre-requisite for the country's integration in the global market.

Prabhu said over 6,00,000 companies in more than 100 countries have chosen electronic article numbering (EAN) standards to meet their identification, codification and communication needs. India cannot be a passive on-looker to these far reaching developments, he added.

Prabhu was inaugurating the conference of chief executive officers (CEO) on `Article Numbering, Bar-coding and EDI', organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci), the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Federation of Indian Export Organisation (FIEO).

The Commerce Secretary said while EDI and the liberalised import regime make it possible for the country's industry to access world technology, the progressive withdrawal of quantitative restrictions of imports as well as reduction in customs duty is posing a challenge to the Indian industry in becoming globally competitive and efficient.

Therefore, said Prabhu, in order to survive in the highly competitive environment, our industry has to introduce all such changes in their respective macro-environment to make their products acceptable to domestic and overseas customers.

The apex business organisations should focus on propagating these skills in order to bring about a quantitative change in the mind set of Indian manufacturers and exporters.UN-ESCAP Bangkok regional advisor on trade facilitation N Janardhan, said that the industry needs to have micro-policy initiatives in addition to the macro-policy initiatives.

We need to have linkage-based strategies as they are the fundamental tools when we talk of these type of technologies, said Janardhan. EAN International technical director Henri Barthel said that supply chain management is about getting the right products or services at the right time. FICCI Foreign Trade Committee co-chairman Vikram Kapur said that technology of article numbering and bar coding are increasingly becoming popular all over the world for effective and efficient supply chain management.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.