siliconindia | | May 20188oods and Services Tax has finally arrived. The most awaited tax reform of Inde-pendent India has gone live after plentiful tribulations and travails spanning more than a decade. The scale of this trans-formation has been enormous. Lot of preparation was required by all the stakeholders to get ready for the transi-tion. The transition itself has been fairly smooth and against most expectations, the disruption was reasonably limited. Most manufacturers took a business shut down for only few days in July to revalue their stocks and determine tax credits that could be carried over to the new regime. The government officials have been agile to support the entire transition with proactive communica-tion and engagement. Neutrality of the tax impact has been ensured, by and large. On the surface, while GST replaces a bunch of Central and State level tax legislations and is intended to simplify tax compliance and ad-ministration, its implications would be far reaching on the business environ-ment and the country's economy. This change would impact business strategy and business models in a significant manner. A big game changer indeed.Logistics and warehousing strat-egy will undergo significant changes. In the pre GST scenario, the supply chain design was based onthe need for tax efficiencies and involved move-ment of goods from manufacturing plant to multiple warehouses as stock transfers before being moved to the eventual selling markets. This resulted in setting up of large number of small-er warehouses and impacted logistics and transportation costs. Post GST, the supply chain architecture can be redesigned to optimize the number of warehouses required, reduce number of shipments and thereby help achieve By Neeraj Basur, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Star Blue Star is a Mumbai based air conditioning and cooling company providing integrated business model of a manufacturer, contractor and after-sales service provider, with an end-to-end solution to its customers.IN MY OpinionGGST, A GAME CHANGER
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