American technology conglomerate Cisco has partnered with some of the largest ports and inland waterways in India like Deendayal, Visakhapatnam, Kolkata Port, and Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) to transform them by digitising their procedures. The company is working on 14 projects across seven seaports in India, out of which three projects have been completed, and 11 are in different stages. Their partnership aligns with India's Maritime Vision 2030, which focuses on increasing the productivity and performance of the nation's maritime sector until the next decade. They believe digitising the ports and waterways of India will reduce the total logistics cost, simultaneously boosting the nation's competitiveness to convert it into a global manufacturing powerhouse. This initiative by Cisco of digitising the seaports and waterways centres on four focus areas. The first is to improve the turnaround time that will directly impact the revenue and capacity. Another focus area is to prevent the loss of revenue and equipment dysfunction by real-time equipment monitoring. Cisco has even planned to assist in improving efficiency using energy management and analytics. In addition, it is even working on increasing employee safety and communications by a multi-channel communication and collaborative platform. According to the sources, the overall cost of logistics to GDP for the biggest economic countries across the world like the US and Europe is around 8% and 9% respectively. This cost is much greater in India that is 13% of GDP. To boost India's competitiveness and convert it into a global manufacturing powerhouse, it is necessary to bring down the overall logistics cost to less than 10% of GDP. Image SourceAlso read: Ramco partners with Malaysia’s MMC to digitally transform five ports Also read: Aveva highlights the need for digital business solutions