BENGALURU : In an ever-changing industry, e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has introduced the country’s first robot-based sortation technology, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) at its Soukya sortation centre in the city. Designed to optimise efficiency and precision on the back-end of the supply chain, the AGVs will help Flipkart meet the growing customer demands, which can ensure faster delivery and better shopping experiences for online shoppers.
The Soukya set-up involves 100+ self-guided bots that automatically sort packages to the right customer pincodes by identifying encoded information on each package. It will enable better throughput from an existing facility, removing the need for space expansion, and will enable the current manpower allocated to the task to be upskilled to do higher value-adding work – all at similar or lower cost.
The Soukya facility has around 1,000 employees at present and processes lakhs of shipments a day. The setup can process up to 4,500 shipments in an hour and can be scaled over 5x with minimal changes. Krishna Raghavan, senior vice president of eKart Tech at Flipkart said, “With the Automated Guided Vehicles, we are re-imagining new growth paths, while orchestrating new and innovative ways of working. We believe this will help bring efficiencies, agility and scale to the supply chain operations, helping us serve the customer better.”