India's only express player's secret behind delivering medicines in 2 hours

MedLife leverages the power of process and technology to deliver medicines to achieve this end; it now plans to crunch the time to 30 minutes or less

Nestled in a lane off Richmond Road, a busy business district in Bengaluru, is a 3,000-square foot stocking and fulfilment centre (FC) of MedLife Express, a division of e-health firm MedLife.

As is the case with any FC, the place is thronged by delivery executives and courier vans churning consignments of retail medicines, day in and day out. But what makes this centre unique is that it is said to be the fastest in the country, in terms of handling the consignments. Nine out of ten orders from this facility are processed in less than five minutes.

The facility is part of the riches MedLife acquired, when early this year it bought medicine delivery start-up Myra, the first player to offer express deliveries back in 2015. At the time, the concept of ordering medicines online was only beginning to pick up.

Cut to 2019, MedLife Express continues to be the only player in the segment offering deliveries within two hours. What’s more, with time its processes and technology systems seem to have matured enough to enable something called Super Express - delivery under 30 minutes.

Achieving express delivery

Faizan Aziz, vice president, products at MedLife, took this reporter inside the Richmond Road FC — the centre is the model for the company’s four other FCs in Bengaluru and one in Mumbai — for this first time, and revealedd what goes behind enabling Express Delivery, at break-neck pace of over 4,000 orders a day. Aziz and Anirudh Coontoor are Myra’s co-founders who joined MedLife after its acquisition.

The FC did not have robots sorting parcels or state-of-the-art assembly lines. At the first glance, it was rather humble with carefully demarcated areas for various functions handled by a team or around 25 men. The whole process works on workflows, proprietary stocking apparatus and back-end technology systems perfected over time, explains Aziz. MedLife also has mobile applications for everyone from the delivery agents to warehouse staff, and smartphone is where all the tasks happen.

The racks at the entrance, meant for delivery agents to pick-up orders, seemed unique. Aziz termed those as “Pigeon Holes”, two-way racks curtain-covered in the front. The way it works is, a delivery agent picks orders from different pigeon holes as per the instructions in his mobile app, and scans each parcel on the app to double-check. One order is retrieved from each pigeon hole, and multiple are emptied because there are usually multiple orders delivered by one executive.

This innovation allows the company to change delivery orders, add more parcels or take out the ones which are to be delivered far off. It is essentially mix and match of delivery routes till seconds before the delivery executives come in. “We are dynamically using the pigeon holes, so whenever we change the route, there is no need of sorting the parcels again. Only the pigeon holes where the delivery person has to pick the order, changes. We change routes every minute, what if an order has come in the last minute?” explains Aziz. This is in contrast to standard delivery — say, by an e-commerce firm — where people manually club different orders in a box which is handed out to the delivery agent, making it an arduous tasks to alter the final shipment in the last minute.

Through pigeon holes, and some refinement in routing algorithms, MedLife Express is able to club in an average 4.8 orders per run, which Aziz claims, is the highest in the industry. Typically, courier companies do somewhere around two orders per run.

Moving on to the inside, there is hardly anything unusual about all the apparatus including the racks. Only that they are not labelled in alphabetically fashion, which would understandably contain medicines the names of which are starting with that alphabet. The racks in fact have special serial numbers. Taking one of them out, you see various compartments in the rack which stack different medicines. The beauty here is that medicines stacked together are the ones that are also typically ordered together – for example, a medicine for common cold along with the cough syrup. The concept is called “Heterogeneous Stacking”, says Aziz, adding that Amazon is the only other player known to follow this process.

Inside the FC, the executive toil around doing different tasks - stacking, retrieval, invoicing, and check-outs. All personnel have smartphones apps where they punch each and every step in their processes. All this real-time data flow into a software dashboard, managed by the FC manager, which records granular information like time spent for each task and swiftness of each employee. A whole lot of automation is fed into the system. For instance, “if load in the warehouse increases, more people will be automatically directed to racking. Likewise, if there is influx in orders, everybody will be moved to checkouts,” says Aziz.

Even, inwarding and inventory management is heavily reliant on technology. Here, MedLife Express uses data science and prediction algorithm that crunches volumes of order data, with a focus on cluster specific buying patterns. Using this, the company claims to be able to predict 94 per cent of the future inventory, which allows it to run on a mere 32-day inventory cycle, far lower than standard pharmacists. The aim is to bring down inventory to about 20 days with time as the algorithms get more astute.

Dominos effect: medicines in 30 minutes 

MedLife, which is expected to raise a major funding round soon, has big plans for its Express Delivery vertical. “Medlife Express is one of the most innovative services in the industry today and we expect to scale aggressively and serve both the acute and chronic needs of the customers,” says CEO Ananth Narayanan.

“We are also testing Super Express Delivery, basically delivery under 30 minutes. Five per cent people in Bengaluru are already getting this without even knowing it. Going forward, we will make it a premium feature and charge Rs 19 for Super Express,” says Aziz.