Day in Flipkart Warehouse

The day started with a misunderstanding between the Cab timing and my departure schedule to the Whitefield warehouse. But now I don’t feel for that as what I experienced through out the day was astounding.

I reached the warehouse with Rishabh, an Engineer from Flipkart, in an auto at 10 o’clock. Hari was already there. He introduced me to some of his team members. One of whom was Sutapa, she was going to guide us in the warehouse visit.

As soon as I went inside I had a glance of the ware house. It was really big. We started our so called warehouse visit with an hour classroom training. Sutapa explained all the terminology of warehouse management. Some of them were very new to me. Such as Inward bulks, Refinishing bulks, WID, IRN, Shipping cancellation bulk and many more.

Finally the visit started. We went inside the warehouse. The tour started with the Book arrival table. I had lot of question and the employee, Ashok, was answering very patiently. As soon as the book shipment arrives at the gate, invoice gets checked. They check each and everything like price is clearly written, no manual intervention has been done on the invoice etc. If Invoice is properly done then only the shipment is allowed inside otherwise they are return back from the gate itself. These are applicable for the supplier who send the goods. If flipkart inbound logistics goes to pick up the goods then they check the invoice at the supplier location itself. which save them the round trip if the invoice is found improper.

Then an IRN is generated against per invoice. Which is getting track till the Items are “mark it as Recieve”. From here Quality Check (QC)  starts. The Quality check is also very logical thought of. The vendor has been classified in three category ( A, B, C ). A is the most trusted vendor, B is the average trusted vendor and C is the new and less trusted vendor. ‘A’ class vendor’s Good goes through the quality check once in a week and sampling is done randomly. B class vendor’s good are check every time it arrives but selectively with random sampling. But ‘C ‘class Vendor’s goods are checked rigorously. Still 70% vendors are C class.

After quality check, the goods go to receiving table. At this table the WID gets generated for the goods except books. The WID gets generated and pasted on the product and the carton which contains this Good. The Receiving table itself generate the put list. Put list is generated floor wise. For a single floor one put list is generated. The put list is a kind of list where against each item its location is mentioned.

Putters take the each put list and put the item in the self mentioned against each product. If item is new then an empty self is marked for the item. After putting the item at the location, the putter comes back and correct the location of item in the system if there is any change. After all correction made the Goods is considered the inventory of Flipkart.

Now comes the most important part, that is picking. As soon as a customer ordered an item it goes in the database and collectively against many orders a pick list is getting generated. The pick list generation is also a optimized algorithm. One pick list has at most 12 items and the items are closely places in a pick zone so that the picker no need to run around much. The picker efficiency was commendable. There was a lot of scope of improvement though. After picking up the items. Picker comes back mark the items picked in the system and pass it to the label and invoice generation table.

Now the item has become the WS retail inventory. At invoice generation table they generate the invoice against each and every order. The tray of items now goes to the packaging table and they do the packaging according to the item.

There are different kind of packaging. For media items bubble wrap packaging, for gift items different kind of packaging, for Bangalore items different kind of packaging for items worth more then 1000 Rs security packaging and many more kind of it.

After packaging the goods move to logistic area. Where the item is marked to shipped and it is weighted there.

Now the items move to E Kart Logistics provider area. They have automated their process. They put the items one by one on the conveyor belt and the label on the item is read by the sensor on the top and the package is automatically placed in the right buckets which are placed in the both side of conveyor belt.

After this the concerned bucket is  emptied in the sacks of max weight of 20 KG and given to the Logistics provider.

Here the positive flow of the process ends and negative flow of the process starts. Two type of Returns happen. One is RTO ( Return To Origin) and other is RVP ( ReVerse Pickup) . Customer Returns go to the Liquidation store but the RTO return back to WS Retail area of warehouse. Where the goods are moved to Refinishing bulk. Here the box is changed if that is damaged, all the apparels go to refinishing agent and come back in 4-5 days.

When the order is getting generate first they look in the WS Retail inventory after that in Flipkart inventory and if both places it is not found it goes to JIT request purchase.

I can go on to write on this visit as much as I want because I had experienced a lot. This was just a macroscopic view of the warehouse. In some other entry I will go deep on each functioning and will explain in detail till then syonara.

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