While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

Developing warehousing infrastructure is the need of the hour in India. This paper talks about its need, benefits, types, storage alternatives, and criteria of good warehousing facilities. It also discusses about the agencies involved in the process and the government's initiatives in this context. However, the paper finds that developing warehousing infrastructure on a need-basis is a challenge and we have to reach high standards to face this, in the coming years.

Ed Acker, Steven Winter Associates, Inc., define warehouses as, "facilities that provide a proper environment for the purpose of storing goods and materials that require protection from the elements. Warehouses must be designed to accommodate the loads of the materials to be stored, the associated handling equipment, the receiving and shipping operations and associated trucking, and the needs of the operating personnel".

India is witnessing a spurt in warehousing infrastructure with the archaic supply chain management facilities going for a makeover and capacity addition. There is an element of dynamism and the online commodity futures market is hastening the change. With the cold chain management emerging as sustainable business, several private players have stepped in to invest.

The growth in warehousing facility is led by delivery demands from the three national commodity exchanges in the northern and western pockets. The producers of wheat, channa, sugar, urad and soyabean prefer to park their crop in warehouses the moment they spot an opportunity in real time futures prices. More than 100 futures contracts of different agri commodities are now traded in different exchanges.

Warehousing Infrastructure: Empowering the Agriculture Sector, storage alternatives, warehousing facilities, shipping operations, warehousing infrastructure, supply chain management, online commodity futures market, private players, national commodity exchanges.