Versatility & adaptability biggest challenge in Omni-Channel retail: GreyOrange

The growth of the retail sector has undoubtedly put immense pressure on supply chain companies to improve and build end to end service solutions in its true sense. Grey Orange – the automation company is addressing the warehouse automation market with their portfolio of material handling automation and technology products.

The company's current focus is on solving operational inefficiencies and manpower issues at distribution centers & warehouses for companies.  Featuring strong partners like Tiger Global, Blume Ventures and delivering automation solutions to leading E-commerce and Logistics companies across Asia, GreyOrange believes that their products adds a lot of value in the back-end Supply chain. In a conversation with Retailer media, Samay Kohli, Co-Founder and CEO, Grey Orange shared how his firm is easing the supply chain management using automated solutions.

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How have the needs of Retailers evolved for SCM as they are rearing for Omni-channel capabilities?
The biggest challenge with building Omni-Channel capabilities is developing the versatility and adaptability in the Systems and processes across the supply chain. While the benefits of Omni-Channel are quite evident in terms of revenue growth, gearing up the Supply chain to enable omni-channel fulfillment comes with its own pitfalls. The Retailers need to become more open to adapting modular, flexible and scalable automation systems, which are versatile and quickly configurable. One such system is Grey Orange’s Butler system. 

How do you enable effective collaboration between all partners of the supply chain in the most efficient manner and less cost to retailer? Please share case studies if you for retailers for this?
A retailer's timeline includes 3 broad processes: Order Receipt, Order Processing and then Transportation. 

Logistics forms a crucial component of the time spent in Order Processing. Our automation systems are handling upto 70,000 shipments per day. This involves reducing dependence on manual labour, automating a number of tasks. 

How do you work in collaboration with retailers and/or logistics providers to reduce their logistics complexity which arises from fragmented channels & increased product variations? 
This problem is most prominent in ecommerce. E-tailers are looking at minimizing the time lag between when the customer places the order and the time when the delivery reaches him. Our entire R&D is currently focused to streamline the order fulfillment process. Our intention is to take a product based approach so that the lessons from each of our projects can be incorporated into every other project that we deliver. The artificial intelligence of our robots ensures that they adopt to order demand patterns. 

How do you bring Optimization on local and regional level & Enhance visibility of product flows?
By combining several processes into one and making them error-proof and manual labor independent. Both Sorters and Butlers work to simplify the logistics and fulfillment functions at the origin thereby eliminating several processing steps further in the supply chain. They can also be configured to work seamlessly around the existing processes and functions. 

Please give us a detailed account of your services for Retailers & who are your clients – since when they have been working with you and your increased portfolio of services to them over the year.
Our services for retailers include:

1. Profiler - High speed dynamic dimension and weighing system, which is a high speed dynamic dimension and weighing system. It captures real volume, box volume, dimensions and dead weight of the parcels. The system reduces operational inefficiencies & helps in reconciliation of payments on the basis of volumetric weight captured.

2. Sorter - High-speed sortation system for package Profiling and Routing, which segregates items based on a certain pre-defined logic. It’s commonly used by logistics and e-commerce companies in order to “sort” their incredible influx of shipments. The current generation of our Sorter has a capacity of sorting up to 3,600 packets & 7,200 packets per hour. It can be integrated with a profiler also. 

3. Butler - Disruptive Robotic Storage & Retreival System, which is based on the disruptive material handling methodology of "Goods to Man". Butlers are robots that move around warehouses like intelligent fork lifts, moving shelves stacked with various products to a floor assistant, who then scans a bar code to confirm the right items. Butlers help a worker pick 500 items per hr per person in contrast to 40 - 80 items/hr by the existing manual process.

Over the last 2 years, we have acquired Jabong, Flipkart, Amazon etc. as our clients with repeat orders in more than 60 per cent cases