Taking a huge step towards digitisation, Flipkart has introduced 100 robots at one of its delivery hubs in the outskirts of Bengaluru. In India, Flipkart is the first such
These automated self-guided vehicles have been assigned the task of sorting packages and are equipped to pick products from a conveyor belt and drops them at a channel that is assigned to a particular pincode. The robots use a collision avoidance technology and stay in a tight grid for free movement.
Each robot is said to improve Flipkart’s warehouse manpower productivity by three times. Post this installation, 4,500 packages can be sorted in an hour which is ten times more than the output Flipkart was getting while using manual sorting in the same time. Flipkart plans to deploy these robots at all of its delivery hubs in the country and claims that the employment of individuals will not be affected and they’ll rather be used for tasks that require value addition. In order to fulfill this objective, they’re already running re-skilling programmes.
The functioning of these warehouses can be further improvised with minimal increases and advancements in the infrastructure and addition of more robots. Amazon which is the primary rival of WalMart’s Flipkart and is also a leader in automation has not yet used any such bots to any of its warehouses in the country. Amazon’s warehouses in the US and Europe are way more digitized as compared to the ones in India. Flipkart is looking forward to digitize its remaining warehouses and target the 200 million new customers yet to be and solve for its efficiency.
