Flipkart has introduced robot-based sortation technology — Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) — at its Soukya sortation center in Bangalore.
Investment in AGVs will optimise efficiency and precision on the back-end of the supply chain. AGVs will assist Flipkart, a leading e-commerce company in India, for ensuring faster delivery and an enhanced experience for online shoppers.
The Soukya set-up involves 100+ self-guided bots that automatically sort packages to the right customer pin-codes by identifying encoded information on each package. It will enable better throughput from an existing facility, removing the need for space expansion.
The Soukya facility has around 1,000 employees at present and processes lakhs of shipments a day.
Tests indicate deploying 100 of these AGVs can lead to over 60 percent increase in process efficiency.
The setup can process up to 4,500 shipments in an hour and can be scaled over 5x with minimal changes. The other advantage is that they can be easily moved across locations as well.
The use of AGVs will enable Flipkart to upskill unskilled labour and future automation will create space for Indian engineers to leverage their expertise in this arena.
Flipkart will be building a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Robotics & Automation, focusing engineering, product, and automation teams under one umbrella. Some future mandates for the CoE will be automation, IoT, electric vehicles etc.
“This will help bring efficiencies, agility and scale to the supply chain operations, helping us serve the customer better,” Krishna Raghavan, senior vice president of eKart Tech at Flipkart, said.
