Robot rising in Flipkart

Flipkart had made considerable changes in the supply chain by automating it with robots. Currently, this automation is brought to the sortation Centre in Bengaluru. The human workers place the products in orange colour robots and these robots sort them after scanning the encoded information on each product and place them in the designated places for delivery. Introduction of robots into the sorting job made the work easy for the workers and it also reduces the time. The accuracy of the placement of the products to the designated places with specific delivery pin code is higher compared to the human intervention in this job. Therefore the error which could happen by human workers can be reduced to a large extend

According to Pranav Saxena, head of robotics in Flipkart the amount of space needed for sorting millions of packages in a large scale business is huge and doing it manually is before the error and is time-consuming, the idea behind using cobots is to work at large scale and provide faster service to the customers. Walmart owned Flipkart is bringing this technology initiative to seek 200 million more customers online which competes with its US-based rival Amazon. The robots are basically automated guided vehicle which is capable of sorting 18000 packages in an hour. They are also capable of working 24 hours, and they self-recharge the battery from the slot available there whenever the battery is about to drain. They have the facility to communicate with each other to avoid coalition and to delegate the work among them. The robots are flexible enough to work in higher workload like unplanned or seasonal demand spikes like the ‘’Big Billion Sale’. Experts see the Flipkart’s use of the robot in the supply chain as a stepping stone towards the supply chain processes all over India. Flipkart increased the sortation efficiency by almost 60 per cent by introducing the automated guided machines to the supply chain process. The technological up-gradation along with the upskilling of manpower is necessary to reduce the logistics cost which will help the online business to grow further.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, the sale of industrial robots in India increased substantially which reached a new record. There are 4771 robots installed in industries across the country in the year 2018 alone which is a 39% increase comparing to the previous year. India now ranks eleventh in the world in terms of annual installation of robots. The worldwide use of robots reached 2.25 million which 3 times increase over the past two decades. The trend suggests that the use of robots will multiply much faster in the next 20 years which will reach 20 million by the year 2030.