Yucatan Growth Consortium: Supply Chain Capability Data Collection

Objective

The overall objective of this project is to develop Yucatan’s industrial competitiveness through Excellence in Supply Chain Capability. Identify a potential industry in the State of Yucatán based on extant small, medium, and large economic units of the industrial, commercial, and service sectors.

Yucatan has a forward thinking business strategy and a well-educated population operating in a safe environment. These strengths are supported by many other cluster specific capabilities. Industries in trade, restaurants, hotels, transport, warehousing, communications, finance and real estate had significant contributions to the state’s GDP; notably, the transport, warehousing and communications, and the electricity and water industry sectors exhibited relatively high growth rates when compared to the other sectors. Yucatan has the potential to attract firms with its highly competitive, business supportive environment.

The specific objectives for this project are to:

1. Take advantage of Yucatan’s location in relation to the Panama Canal and other significant ports to optimize efforts of distributors and logistics providers but also of manufacturers to gain access to major markets.
2. To leverage the state’s strengths and create a value proposition to attract firms and encourage market development.
3. To analyze current business processes and generate scenarios created based on return on investment (ROI) for manufacturers, distributors, logistics and other service firms.
4. Identification and characterization of the economic units of the State of Yucatan: small, medium, and large.
5. Grouping, by affinity, the economic units in order to identify related activities.
6. Define potential industries and the government’s actions that required for it´s development.

The intellectual merit is to bring a significant knowledge-base developed at TAMU to a fertile scientific and market communities in Yucatan, to create a binational effort between USA and Mexico. Currently, any investigation that requires detailed information about the economic units of Yucatan, results limited in view of the scarcely pertinent and up to date information since that available is shown vaguely on the matter. The present project would contribute information that could underpin posterior research.

The anticipated binational problems include the improvement of research on market-driven opportunities between Texas and Yucatan. This will provide opportunities to multinational companies commercially vested in the USA and Yucatan as a contact point towards operations in Central and South America.

The anticipated results of this Tier I project include the establishment of collaborations to innovate for competitive advantage. Followed by the next process, consisting of maintaining business continuity.

The broader impacts include joining current agreements between Presidents Obama and Pena Nieto in market sharing and improvement of commercial, scientific, and academic opportunities. The implementation of this project is also foreseen to impact academic and scientific levels given that it would provide primary source information regarding the situation of enterprises in diverse sectors; at a socioeconomic level as public policies could identified to increase certain sectors, as well as possibilities of productive chaining that could strengthen the economic development of the State; at a enterprise level as non-visible business opportunities could be identified.