How Indian e-commerce players can use robotics to gain competitive edge?

To continue at this pace, the industry needs to find ways to optimise the resources and bring more efficiency. Warehousing and supply chain management is one of the most crucial cost components for e-commerce players. Warehousing costs for an e-commerce player can go upto as high as 25 percent of their total supply chain costs. With focus shifting from standard to specialised deliveries (same day delivery, slotted delivery, 4 hour delivery etc), the importance of more effective logistics, warehousing, and supply chain management cannot be overstated. 

If you have ever ordered something on an e-commerce site and followed up with customer care executives on non-delivery, damaged goods, or delivery of wrong products, you can easily relate to the challenges of e-commerce warehouses.

With tens of thousands of different items to be sorted according to weight, size, colour, variants, to be sent to scattered destinations, and documented at every stage till it reaches the consumer, a warehouse is all about many complex operations. Add the constant pressure to provide the fastest service at lowest costs, and the challenge suddenly becomes uber complex.

This is not an India problem alone. In fact warehouses across the world are ill managed, making basic operations like sorting, picking, storing, and documenting, inefficient and at times, unreliable. It is one of the most traditional industries, which has been technology-starved for decades. But like in several other instances - such as mobile telephony - India has the opportunity to leapfrog generations of tech innovation to reach or breach global benchmarks - aided not just by the booming ecommerce sector - but by the very innovation that drives our nation.

By implementing robotic solutions, warehouses can increase their throughput by 10 x, using the same or even lesser space and resources, reduce the lead time for processing orders, reduce errors in packaging and dispatching, and improve the overall consumer experience. 

E-commerce players understand this need and are consciously investing in automation technologies that can make prices more competitive, enhance consumer experience through faster deliveries, while handling the increasing volumes of shipments and increasing levels of complexity of operations. For example, industry leader Flipkart recently announced an investment of $ 2.5 billion into expanding and modernising its warehouses and logistics over the next 5 years. Snapdeal acquired 6 technology and logistics companies in order to cut down its delivery time by 70 percent. 

As warehouses move into tier 2 and 3 cities (in order to save real estate cost and cover remote geographies), we will see heavier investments in technology - specifically robotics. One of the biggest benefits of adopting robotic technologies, which usually does not get enough credit, is the scalability it brings in a company’s supply chain operations. As your business grows, your warehouse will require to do more. Most robotic automation solutions available today are agile and scalable (and you should not buy them if they are not), that grow with your business. 

Considering the challenges faced by warehouses today, which are expected to only get more complicated as we move forward, automation of warehouses is no more a choice but a mandate. Those who take this up proactively will have a clear, irrevocable competitive advantage over others. 

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Yaduvendra Singh is vice president & global head (sales, marketing & solutions group) at GreyOrange India Pte Ltd