Robots at Flipkart sort out 5k parcels per hour, compared to 450 by humans

Flipkart said it is introducing India's first robot-based sortation technology at its sortation centre on Soukya Road in the city's outskirts

Venkat Swamy works at one of the sortation facilities of online retailer Flipkart located in an industrial area of Bengaluru, which is surrounded by warehouses, factories, temples, churches, and dusty roads. A few months back he would pick up products that customers had ordered, do the sorting, and walk back and forth in the facility to keep them ready for shipping to various destinations. 

It was tiring and monotonous, but an activity he had to perform in his eight-hour shift. Swamy now manages robots which support him in this work. 

He just needs to place the product on the orange-coloured robots and the machines automatically sort packages to the right customer pincodes or bins by identifying the encoded information on each parcel. 

The robots at the Flipkart facility can sort 5,000 packages per hour, compared to 450 parcels sorted by humans at the same time. These robots, or automated guided vehicles (AGVs), can work 24x7 and automatically charge themselves at various charging points when their battery is drained after eight hours of work. 

“The throughput which these (robots) are providing is almost 10x of what we would have achieved,” said Pranav Saxena, vice-president, robotics and automation at Flipkart. “These robots talk to each other in real time, whether it is to (prevent) collision or for workload distribution,” added Saxena. 

Flipkart said it was introducing India’s first robot-based sortation technology at its sortation centre on Soukya Road in the city’s outskirts. This is seen as a stepping stone towards introducing automation across the supply chain. At the Flipkart facility, more than 100 self-guided robots automatically sort packages.

“This is India’s first innovation. The big problem that we want to solve through automation is precision, scale, and efficiency,” said Krishna Raghavan, senior vice-president, eKart Tech at Flipkart.

Last September, robotics start-up GreyOrange said it had raised $140 million in a funding round led by Mithril Capital, co-founded by Ajay Royan and billionaire investor Peter Thiel. In this round, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal had also invested. But Flipkart said it is not working with GreyOrange for this initiative and procuring the robots from multiple vendors and customising them in accordance with India’s conditions and needs.
 

The facility at Soukya Road has about 1,000 employees at present and processes millions of shipments a day. The company said the AGVs would work in conjunction with the facility staff, who would be trained in operating them. 

Tests indicate that deploying 100 of these AGVs can lead to over 60 per cent increase in process efficiency. The set-up can process up to 4,500 shipments in an hour and can be scaled to over 5x with minimal changes. The other advantage is that they can be easily moved across locations as well. 

This will also help Flipkart keep up with scale requirements, speed up the delivery process further, and boost customer experience. 

In May last year, US retail giant Walmart agreed to pay $16 billion for about 77 per cent stake in Flipkart, a transaction that valued the home-grown e-commerce company for over $20 billion. Walmart’s US rival Amazon is already at the forefront of automation and working on new methods of creating robots to do the work once done by the employees. Amazon began sending out robots to its warehouses in 2014. These were originally built by Kiva Systems, a firm that Amazon acquired for $775 million in 2012 and renamed Amazon Robotics. The company has more than 100,000 robots deployed across the world, and it plans to add more such machines.

Besides Amazon, said Satish Meena, a senior forecast analyst at Forrester Research, globally all the major e-commerce companies, including JD.com and Alibaba, are investing in warehouse automation. “So that their warehouses are efficient to reduce the cost on manpower and time of delivering the products to the customers,” said Meena, adding, “You can’t have so many employees at the warehouse; they want to remove manpower involved in it and automate everything.”

But Flipkart said the initiative will allow the current manpower allocated to the task to be upskilled to do greater value-addition — all at a similar or lower cost. It said the use of AGVs will enable it to upskill unskilled labour and future automation will create space for Indian engineers to leverage their expertise in this arena.

As the automation and robotics ecosystem in India is currently non-existent, Flipkart plans to partner start-ups and university campuses to drive innovation and research. The company is building a centre of excellence (CoE) for robotics and automation, focusing on engineering, product, and automation teams under one umbrella. Some future mandates for the CoE will be further automation, electric vehicles, and the Internet of Things, a technology where devices communicate with each other intelligently. This will help the firm continue building India-specific solutions, hiring talent, and incorporating affordable automation into its business model. “These robots work in tandem with humans,” said Raghavan of Flipkart.

Devangshu Dutta, chief executive officer of retail consultancy Third Eyesight, said in the West the cost of hiring talent at facilities like warehouses is high, which has led to replacing humans with robots, but in India because of the large number of people, the cost is not really a factor for the firms here. “Automation is important for the companies that are looking at a high degree of consistency in their operations,” said Dutta.