How to build a supply chain solution for a rural network?

A friend of mine recently started an interesting assignment. For the next six months, he will be working with Drishtee, an organization based in Delhi that links manufacturers with kirana stores in small to medium size villages. My friend is responsible for finding a scalable supply chain solution for this network.

"Drishtee plans to scale up to become sustainable but can't because it's existing supply chain process is paper based, data entry intensive and error prone (the error rate is whats killing them). I am basically trying to find a solution to this problem. Can't really use the existing Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions, because there is generally no internet access, no computers etc. - very poor infrastructure in general. So something that is cell phone based, with maybe some portable printers. And it has to be easy to use - the guys in the field aren't "tech savvy"."

All this in 6 months - good luck! He is blogging about his experience, in case you are interested.