Expanding our grocery, fulfilment centres in 12 months: Flipkart's Badri

50% customers will see same/next-day deliveries this festival season: Flipkart's Hemant Badri

Flipkart is planning to expand its grocery facilities, fulfilment centres, and technology efforts, including automation, across India in the next 12 months, says Hemant Badri, senior vice-president, head of supply chain and customer experience, Flipkart Group, in a video interview with Peerzada Abrar. Edited excerpts:

What are your expansion plans and strategy to tap the festival season?

There have been immense learnings for all of us from 10 years since the launch of our first ‘The Big Billion Days (TBBD)’ sales event. Every year it (TBBD) gets better for our customers, sellers, and partners. We have added 1.9 mn square feet of facilities and last-mile centres in Tier-II and Tier-III cities and towns. We have expanded grocery facilities. We are doing a lot of automation. This includes cross-belt sorters; many of them are designed and built in India. We have added almost 100,000 seasonal jobs, which includes a lot of women workforce. We also have over 20,000 women and 2,000 people with disabilities (PwDs) working with us. 

How are you focusing on improving the speed of delivery?

Almost 40-50 per cent of our customer population will experience same-day or next-day deliveries this festival season. We also have an ‘open box delivery’ service that allows customers to verify and inspect their shipment before accepting the delivery. Through our VIP subscription, customers are eligible to receive samples from various brands and offerings like free same and next-day delivery, and return within 48 hours. Also, Flipkart now has more than 1.4 million sellers on its platform. Also, kirana stores have been our strong proposition. We started with some 27,000 kirana stores partnering with us as the last-mile delivery. Today, we have over 200,000 kiranas or micro-entrepreneurs registered with us. About 40 per cent of our deliveries are being done through them. 

What are your plans for scaling up technology and innovation efforts?

We are building a lot of indigenous technologies suitable for India’s needs. Our ‘fulfilment centre’ in Haringhata, West Bengal, is as big as 12 Olympic-sized football grounds. You can’t make people walk. So everywhere, we have conveyor belts running for about 10 km. We use automated storage and retrieval systems. We have built cross-belt sorters which simplify sortation. A lot of technology is used for vehicle tracking, geocoding and address intelligence for last-mile delivery. Our algorithms identify the right address and that is helping us deliver in Tier-III cities and towns accurately. Our automated guided vehicles (AGV) are simplifying material movement. We are simplifying human efforts and automating it, so that we can get high reliability and consistency. Over the next 24 months, we could look at over 10 cross-belt sorters to automate sortation. We are also expanding six grocery fulfilment centres in Tier-II and Tier-III cities over the next 12-18 months.

How are you strengthening your partnerships with logistics players?

We have partnered with Indian Railways and we move a significant load for long-haul destinations. That continues to be a strength and we will keep sharpening that. Expansion in Tier-3 cities is important. We are also improving our speed of delivery directly. The highway infrastructure is improving. We see a 15 per cent-20 per cent reduction in the logistics transit time. For middle-mile logistics, we have partnered with players, such as Mahindra Logistics. We also have a partnership with SpiceJet for their air cargo service. We have partnered with Mahindra Logistics for the deployment of electric vehicles across our logistics fleet in the country.

How is Flipkart driving inclusion and diversity in its workforce?

We believe in inclusion and diversity. And equality is essential in every way Flipkart operates. Our belief is that our customer profile should be reflected in our workforce profile. A few of our facilities are completely run by women, like the grocery facilities in Coimbatore and Guwahati. It is encouraging to see that multiple states are giving us approval and permission to run a night shift with women workers and providing the commutation facility. We recently got such approval in Haryana. They (women workers) are consistently delivering productivity, performance and commitment to the work. Our ambition is for equal participation of women. Equally, we are passionate about (hiring) people with disabilities (PwD).

Drug firm Cipla recently launched drone delivery of critical medicines in Himachal Pradesh. Does Flipkart have any such plans?

We have a lot of experiments and projects running. Flipkart Health has completed a drone delivery pilot for medicines. We are looking to deliver (medicines) in the core supply chain. Drone technology will be a reality for deliveries in the future. But today, it is at an experimentation level. We have a few partnerships for this. We are doing the trials within our own facilities. The overall vision is that in a remote location, it will be more useful. You have to identify use cases where topography is difficult. The aerial routes there can help you reach faster. However, there are still a few limitations to making the delivery directly to the customer.