Unveiling the Super Stars, the Super Achievers and the Exemplars

Super UNVEILING THE

STARS AND ACHIEVERS

After a long hiatus of three years from our debut event in August 2019, Celerity hosted yet another powerpacked starry awards evening on September 14, 2022. This on-ground event, after having hosted it online for two years (due to the onset of the pandemic), was even bigger & better with it now taking shape of a day-long conference focussing on every facet of the supply chain and offering a poised platform to next gen logisticians and stalwarts to gather under one roof and discuss on the fast-unfolding multi-dimensional supply chain landscape. Honouring the best in class, the Celerity Supply Chain Awards night was truly a great evening to remember and be a part of the envious logistics fraternity that is set to chart an incredible growth story. A new category of Awards, Exemplary Awards was introduced for corporates running exemplary supply chains. Handpicked by a panel of Jury members consisting of senior supply chain practitioners, the winners have set benchmarks amongst their peers. Here’s the account of some of the most deserving winning entries of Under-30 Super Stars, Under-40 Super Achievers, and Exemplary Supply Chains Awards 2022, which will be continued in the next issue as well…

30 UNDER 30 SUPPLY CHAIN SUPERSTARS 2022

Kshitiz Kumar,

Project Leader, Bain & Company The genset business of one of my organisations caters to selling of diesel gensets for retail and industrial segments. It has two manufacturing models – assembling in-house and subcontracting to OEMs scattered across India. The sourcing for the outsourced model was done by sub-contractors themselves. Subcontracting models were relatively costlier than the in-house ones. The assembly cost was at par with the in-house cost; hence, the main challenge lies in direct material sourcing, which these local players won’t have owing to lack of volumes. We decided to consolidate the demand of all the local OEMs for components contributing to 80% of BOM cost and reached out to respective category sourcing leads for machined and moulded items, who could utilise their leverage on auto component suppliers to achieve better rates. Through this innovative solution, savings of 9% on direct material costs was achieved on subcontracted models, which made our genset brand more cost competitive in the market. Increase in credit terms to give additional savings of 1.25% as our centralised sourcing team with better leverage dealt with suppliers on behalf of local players.

Ayush Agarwal,

Co-founder & Chief Business Officer, Intugine Technologies Pvt Ltd. Intugine embarked on a journey to empower global enterprises with real-time visibility of shipments across road, rail, ocean, and air. Creating an integrated network large enough to cater to most of our customers' requirements was challenging. We built a comprehensive visibility solution to track and trace freight across modalities by integrating with multiple systems like government infrastructure, telecom operators, carrier companies, etc. Our solutions improved OTIF and order-to-delivery TAT, helped eliminate operational inefficiencies, and reduced logistics costs. Today, we have helped optimise and digitise over 75 brands' supply chain functions and are proud to be the only real-time multimodal supply chain visibility company in India.

My first corporate exposure was as an Operations Summer Intern at Lenovo Pvt. Ltd. At Lenovo, I worked on redesigning the reverse logistics of electronic devices to eliminate product pilferage and subsequent sales loss. It was a stand-alone project where I was working under the guidance of the inventory manager for the organisation. As an intern when I joined, given the complexity of the project, my guide was sceptical if a student with no corporate experience would be able to contribute significantly to the project. Not much concerned by this perception, I started reaching out to stakeholders, cross-functional teams and other individuals involved in the project to gain understanding and hold of the project. After 15 days, I had sufficient analysis done and presented my ideas to him. He was amazed to see the progress and realized that the project could be completed on time. We worked together as a team and the project was completed on-time yielding savings of $1.3 Mn Dollars. I was awarded the Best Summer intern Title along with a Pre-Placement Interview offer from Lenovo for delivering the project. This experience made me learn the power of persistence and believing in self.

HUL acquired the Health Food Drinks (HFD) business from GSK CH in April 2020. The acquisition was not only for the Indian subsidiary of GSK CH, but Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as well. Both countries imported HFD products from India. On day 1, India supply chain was supposed to run on JDE & BPCS as the ERP, while the importing countries had to be live on SAP U2K2. This implied the handshake of two different ERP systems had to be seamless in order to avoid service loss. The ask was clear, apart from the technical go live, 35+ Indian employees had to be onboarded on SAP across 4 factories, in a span of 3 months. This entailed ERP licensing, training costs and the risk of supply disruption if the documentation is not first time right. The solution proposed was to hire Capgemini (CG) resources (existing third party) to do the transactions in SAP on behalf of Indian GSK factories. It was a challenging negotiation with them to deploy additional resources as part of their existing contract. With no precedence to this, multi – stakeholder alignment involving Technology teams, Factories, Finance and Legal to build 25+ masters in SAP, and onboard Capgemini as the partner. An exhaustive list of 100+ activities and RACI charts along with 2 User Acceptance Tests were conducted in the test server before going live. Co-ordination between remotely located CG resources (who were doing the backend transactions) and printing of physical invoice from factories was done in real-time. The required documentation at customs was tested too from a legal perspective to ensure no stone unturned for endto-end exports transaction. This effort saved 155KEuros at 4 factory locations. Apart from cost avoidance, this model eliminated the supply risks specially during Covid, due to manpower shortage in factories. For this initiative, I was awarded the Nutrition Make Cutover Hero.

As the primary subject matter expert of Warehouse Automation and Material Flow System (MFS) – an automation module within SAP, I significantly contributed to the growth of my organization as one of the market leaders in the Supply Chain and IT consulting domain by driving complex warehouse automation solutions for our clients who were embarking on a digital transformational journey by integrating with ASRS, Conveyor Systems, Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs).

I designed the product roadmap for Lighthouse - our in-house Supply Chain Planning solution which caters to the SME segment. I envisioned a revamped user experience and algorithmic robustness which does away with the siloed approach to supply, demand, replenishment planning. This also involved the incorporation of AI / ML algorithms. The revamped solution resulted in 15% improvement in forecast accuracy (RMSE) for our existing clients, fewer disruptions in the planning cycle (25%), and reduction in inventory holding costs for our biggest Lighthouse client in the US by 8% through product segmentation and improved algorithms for demand planning such as Croston's Method, Neural Networks.

Bharti Yadav, Manufacturing Manager – Tea Manufacturing Site, Hindustan Unilever Ltd.

Isha Agarwal, Global Planning Excellence Manager - Asia, Hindustan Unilever Ltd.

Rohit Kamath, Project Manager – Digital Supply Chain, Stellium Inc

40 UNDER 40 SUPPLY CHAIN SUPER ACHIEVERS 2022

Looking back on my 19 years of experience, there were many significant innovations & breakthroughs that enabled me to achieve, advance in my career and contribute to Organization's Success. Started the journey by breaking gender stereotypes with manufacturing engineering as qualification and working as the first female in the team of building and commissioning of machines. Led many innovations and projects like design of Ortho Implants & equipment, enabled connected operation theatres in hospitals, reduced 50% quality defects in water purifier, turned a closing factory into a top performing factory and enabled digital transformation in factories to improve efficiencies. Each of these interventions delighted many patients, consumers, customers and provided significant benefits, cost savings and competitive advantage to organisation.

Srividya Govindarajan, Site Director, Hindustan Unilever Ltd.

My team and I, recognised in early 2021, the commodity inflation trends that are expected to hit at a global scale. The impact we predicted in Apr 2021 for commodity inflation going into 2022 was as high as 15% of the spend portfolio. We realised early on that the existing approaches and traditional practices of cost savings was unlikely to address 15% spend increase coming from unprecedented inflation across multiple commodities. I worked together with our business improvement director, Wendy Rowe and our team to conceptualise and develop a control tower strategy that focused on 4 pillars of execution to address inflation – Pricing; Product Value Engineering; Value Stream Optimization; and Procurement Analytics & Value Add.

The Project framework was aptly named Hummingbird and worked as a rallying cry everyone could get behind to change our existing ways of working and be as agile and efficient as a hummingbird. Our biggest win with the project was the project design and pitching this project to Asia Pacific President and his leadership team to make this an enterprise level strategy for the organisation. Their unflinching support and commitment to the program ensured each stream was resourced and owned by the respective functional leads- Commercial, R&D, Supply Chain, Finance and Procurement teams, all working in unison to address the external challenge. 60 people across different departments worked together on this project delivering more than 6% of our total sales value in the region through project Hummingbird. This is one of the highest value creation projects the region has run, especially in these turbulent times.

The fact that we identified the problem and started early gave us considerable advantage vs competitors. Work is in progress to embed the learnings from this program into long term sustained value creation strategies across the business and to unlock new pillars of value creation. This project has changed the way our organisation looks at value creation. Personally, this has helped me think, act and deliver as a business leader than just as a functional leader of procurement.

In my recent role with Coupang, I was responsible for setting up a control tower function for Coupang. This work involved right from hiring/ setting up a team, driving process/ product charter for Control tower for long term growth and scale. Control tower has now become a more inalienable part of Coupang Supply chain. We have centralised many actions for faster decision making. On a personal front, this experience was rewarding and fulfilling. This has given me lot of confidence and leadership visibility. I have realised that if you are willing to work hard and if you have a great team, you can achieve miracles.

Arun Sudheendran, Procurement Director, McCormick & Company

Rajdeep Kumar Mittal, Director – Process Innovation (Control tower), Coupang.com

Arpita Srivastava, IBP Lead, Accenture

Ashish Bhatt, Chief Operating Officer, APL Logistics VASCOR Automotive Pvt. Ltd.

Naveen Srivastava,

General Manager – Integrated Supply Chain, Jubilant Foodworks Ltd. In a professional journey spanning over ten years, I have been instrumental in leading various process improvement and digital transformation projects. While working in the supply chain domain, my focus had always been on providing and enhancing visibility. If it’s not visible, you can’t measure. If you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

I led the EU Falsified Medicines Directive Implementation program to ensure organisation’s compliance from a supply perspective. Considering the complexity of the health authority’s regulations, vastness of portfolio and a hard deadline, the project needed a high level of attention to each piece. This required transition of 600+ SKUs in terms of new pack design impacting BOM, 30+ manufacturing lines, and building data exchange connectivity with 50+ partners/National bodies. I structured the program, collaborated with all concerned teams and ensured visibility throughout, so that there was no supply disruption. I followed an agile methodology to ensure any deviation was taken care of promptly and supplies continued, without any capacity loss and/or stock outs in the market.

Yet another of my key contributions was to get the inventory tracker and artwork validity status integrated for DTM, wherein data from multiple sources (3PL/own warehouse/in-transit) was pulled onto a single platform to provide end-to-end FG stock visibility along with release status and best before dates at all nodes. This was later fed to IBP for netting off and planning supply against net demand. The periodic safety variations led to frequent artwork change which came with a hard deadline. So, to ensure business continuity and avoid any packing material destruction, SKU focused approach was developed in collaboration with the regulatory and packaging department so that a batch was packed and released with valid artwork. This enabled country managers to plan monthly sales and any promotions and aided inventory liquidation of SKUs with low shelf life and/or slow moving ones. This helped in keeping the Cost of Lost Opportunity in check while minimising excess stock. These efforts have helped the organisations not just save money, but also deliver excellent customer service.

I have onboarded all the OEM customers of my organization APLL VASCOR which was really challenging as it was about selling a concept which was non-existent at that time, it was a complete modal shift and realigning strategy task for all of them. It started from a project level where we were taking license from Indian railways to run our own automotive freight trains. It was actually a paradigm shift for the OEMs to switch from road mode to rail mode of transportation. I take pleasure in stating that I was one of the key persons who were a part of this transition in the country and in the industry. We have grown the revenue of the organisation by about 70% in the last two years working in the capacity of Head of the organisation and cemented long-term contracts for a solid base and to ensure that the growth is permanent. During this journey as a part of our commitment towards sustainable logistics, we have reduced our carbon footprint by saving 133,000 Mt of CO2 in the last 8 years.

We, at JFL, delivered ~99.5+% line fill rate despite high demand volatility & supply uncertainty where we receive/perform ~15 million + order annually, deploying over 250 vehicles, 0.2 M+ Km, with a production capacity of close to 350 M units, serving 1650 restaurants with over ~1200 manpower at plant/3PL & 30,000 at restaurants.

We achieved this mean feat by working on agile supply / resource planning, which helped us in getting frequent updates in forecast based on actual situation on ground (Operational stores, daily sales); POS data visibility; demand sensing; continuous supply risk assessment and inventory build-up; intense cross-functional collaboration and a complete visibility of operations (Demand visibility, update on supplies), Suppliers (Supply plan continuity) and QA Team (Shelf-Life Management).

This helped us in the improvement in key metrics as compared to the traditional method of stock indenting. Daily forecast accuracy improved by 38%. Stock-out has decreased by 36%. Inter-store stock transfers have reduced by 39% and reduction in emergency indents raised by stores for critical stock items by 10%.

I started my professional stint with Premium Farm Fresh Pvt Ltd., which is into private agri wholesale market. Central Government allowed private player to operate Farmers Markets (Mandies) by issuing central license to break the monopoly of APMCs. So PFFPL was the first company to win this licensing bid for multiple Agri hubs.

My profile here was to develop backward linkages with farmers and bring them onto the marketplace to sale their produce located at Nashik in Maharashtra. PFFPL market had good network of buyers from multiple corporates like Reliance, SAFAL and distributors from cities like Mumbai & Pune. We tried awareness activities to bring farmers in market to sale their goods but the local APMCs and middlemen network were too strong to break.

To break this network, we conceptualised the idea of ‘Hub & Spoke model’ where we mapped all production centres surrounding to our Market (Hub) and mapped them into spoke and decided to start collection centres at spokes. collection centres (Spoke) established on light asset mode on leased land with basic facilities like trade platform, Movable washrooms for farmers, Grading and Packaging sheds. Due to better price realisation and facilities, we started getting tremendous response from farmers and collection centres were flooded with agri produce. Further instead of bringing goods to main market (Hub) from spokes, these collection centres become individual mini marketplaces under hub. Farmers were able to sale their produce with better pricing at their vicinity without incurring cost to bring produce at APMC, eliminating middlemen and commission agents. One after another, we established seven collection centres cum mini markets, and ran the trade successfully for commodities like Tomato, Grapes, Assorted vegetables with total trade value in Crores. Hub & spoke model is successful story now and preferred by many corporates to procure commodities from farmers.

While addressing issues in rural supply chain, our team came across the question, ‘What makes farmers to sale their produce in distressed market?’ And the answer is lack of liquidity and seasonal production with lack of storage facilities where the problem lies in. Credit facilities are not approachable neither flexible at rural economy.

So, to deal with this, we proposed the idea of ‘Farmer’s Warehouse’ during my tenure in Agri warehousing space. We established the first ‘Farmer’s Warehouse’ with all statutory compliance at Latur (MH) where farmers to store their goods. Warehouse Receipt (WHR) was being issued to farmers against stored goods. But to attract financial institutes to lend farmers, there must be some guarantee to safeguard lending for banks. To ease this, we tied with corporates who had shown interest to purchase farmer stock from farmers’ warehouse.

Finally, we were able to bring private and govt banks under one roof and started lending to the farmers with back to back purchase guarantee from corporates if loan defaults. We got tremendous response for farmers’ warehouse. Its win-win for all stakeholders. Farmers are storing their stock in scientific way at warehouse and get liquidity through WHR loan, financial institutes are lending to farmers, its Priority Sector Lending (PSL) and corporates are able to purchase from farmers, eliminating middlemen with good pricing. It became multi-location model in short time and has been implemented across the states with multiple banking institutes with asset under management (AUM) funding of ~1K crores. These are some events and journey is still continued to analyse rural supply chain and think for the farmers’ betterment with the simplest and implementable solutions.

Vishal Raskar, Head – Inventory & Logistics, Alpha Alternatives

Vishal Pandey,

Sr. Business Architect, Google Kimberly-Clark launched its sustainability 2030 vision, and it required a centralised and global platform to track, support, and manage the overall program. I, along with my team, designed and implemented a global platform to track the historical, current, and plans for 50+ Supply chain sustainability metrics from 10+ different sources. The platform helped the sustainability key users and leadership team to take data-driven action to achieve Kimberly-Clark’s sustainability 2030 vision.

As Global Business Architect Lead, I collected detailed requirements from users from all four regions across different sustainability areas and source systems and owned the detailed design and architecture of the entire product. Multiple tech stacks were evaluated, and we implemented the product using SAP ERP, HANA, Automation Anywhere bot, API, ETL, Tableau, etc., to build the final product.

Through this, we achieved real-time visibility of 50+ KPIs for carbon footprint, energy footprint, Plastic footprint, Forest and Fiber footprint, Social Impact, Water footprint, etc. We could visualise each KPI at global, regional, country, or mill levels and empowered sustainability users and the leadership team to plan future programs and take quick actions based on real-time metrics.

Supply chain sustainability users can track each KPI at the most granular level, and based on future predictions, the team can take action on the planned items for each factor. In case of any KPIs behind the target, quicker corrective actions were possible on each metric parameter, thereby helping Kimberly-Clark team stay on track to achieve its 2030 vision of sustainability.

In my current role with the Product & Engineering team with Google, I am working on integrating all the partners in the Alphabet Supply Chain ecosystem and implementing some of the latest industry practices and innovations for real-time and deeper collaboration with all our B2B supply chain partners and stakeholders.

EXEMPLARY SUPPLY CHAINS 2022 (CORPORATE AWARDS)

Tata Play Limited

Overhauling the entire process change efficiently, Tata Play was able to augment the supply chain successfully and leaving a successful trail for others to follow. Here’s the short account of our Exemplary Supply Chain company – Tata Play and the way they led the transition effectively…

WITH use of standard ERP system along with challenge of training resources frequently, Tata Play was faced with other challenges such as Low visibility of processes to all stakeholders; Difficult to configure approval matrices; Different systems for entire procurement process; and Difficult to use UI/ UX for internal and external stakeholders.

Highlighting the challenges, Neha Gupta, Senior Manager, Tata Play Ltd., elaborated, “The largest tool for any procurement function is Source to Pay tool, which covers the entire organisation across the multiple functional teams, all regional offices and partners.” For the implementation of new S2P tool, the company faced and resolved multiple challenges on these fronts:

Integration: The biggest challenge was to integrate the existing system with the new proposed tool. To go ahead with such integration of S2P tool with and a legacy ERP system (Tata Play

had to ensure a smooth transition and sustainable deployment with minimum failures in BAU). Process Mapping: As the company has been using existing system for 10+ years, it had built in lot of customisations and mapping those customisations into the new tool was difficult considering the fact that process flow for S2P was very different than existing system.

Data Field Mapping: Due to difference in terminology, there was a challenge to have all the fields of our existing system, which were getting captured replicated in new system. This challenge got accentuated by the fact that any field change in the new tool would reflect across the entire customer base of platform provider.

Change Management: Launching a tool of such a scale has been challenging in many aspects as this change had an organisation-wide impact. The project was required to resolve multiple issues, guidance across the different functions, driving accountability and most importantly ensuring delight and efficiency as result.

APPROACH & METHODOLOGY

Integration Approach – To start with the integration, “We first and foremost figured out the number of touchpoints and number of fields where both the systems would be interacting and deciding on the process of interaction. This was a critical element as our S2P tool has a lot of new functionalities such as Special characters, exponential values which were not accepted at ERP end. Hence, we introduced a middleware layer which was not only pushing the data from one system to another but also validating the data,” added Neha Gupta.

Process Mapping: To overcome this challenge, “We started with Identification of mandatory fields required in SAP and mapping the same with Zycus fields by utilisation of existing fields and creation of custom fields which ensured that all the data which is mandatory in SAP gets captured in a correct fashion. We also created multiple master base in new tool to ensure correct data pick up and flow to ERP,” she stated.

Data Field Mapping: In a SAAS based S2P tool, fields are standard, and any modification leads to changes in the tool across the players. To overcome the challenge of mapping multiple data fields, the company found out the fields, which were not being utilised across any player and customised those to the organisation’s requirements.

Change Management: The team got a buy-in of key stakeholders by educating and creating awareness. “We deployed a dedicated project team for the effective roll-out of the project. We also imparted specific need-based trainings to the stakeholders along with having a help desk for easy and quick resolution on challenges. Strategic communication was done from executive sponsors to entire organisation,” elaborated Neha Gupta.

OUTCOME

As the roll-out of the modules happened for the entire organisation and across pan-India locations, the benefits of same have been 3-fold:

For SCM, as a procurement function, deliver better results on savings. The company was able to reduce turnaround time (TAT) from 43 days to 7 days by moving considerable amount of procurement to Catalogue. The new tool allowed to eliminate redundant approvals along with making it a highly transparent approval process. There is better analytics and insights on data available in system.

For users, the process has improved with a fairly simple to deal with UI / UX, and nomenclature. There is greater visibility on approvals and faster processing of their requests.

To our external partners, it acts as a single tool for transactions with Tata Play where they can register / update their organisation details, track the issued PO, participate in RFQ and e-bidding events, check and give inputs on performance evaluation through a single platform and single login ID.

THINK Gas

THINK Gas has introduced global best practices in safety, processes, technology and customer relationship management in City Gas Distribution business and is committed to building a robust infrastructure to deliver natural gas to its customers. The company uses a unique, first of its kind Journey Management Application (JMA), which not only helps maintain records digitally but also the online status of various vehicle parameters. Here’s a snapshot of THINK Gas’ innovative service expanse…

THINK Gas has been set up as I Squared Capital’s Natural Gas and LNG platform in India and Asia.

Established in 2018, THINK Gas is a 4-year-old environmentally conscious company, which aims to benefit the country with the supply of natural gas to Domestic, Commercial, Industrial and Automotive (CNG) sectors. The company has seven licenses to operate city gas distribution networks in 13 districts in India, across the states of Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, altogether covering an area of 47,000 sqkms and a population of over 17 million.

Whilst CGD companies are building their core infrastructure over the earlier years of their development, a network of CNG Stations at OMC outlets is often set up to create a CNG ecosystem and cater to the immediate demands of the market. Gas is transported to these stations by Mobile Cascade Vehicles (MCVs). The movement of these vehicles for supply of natural gas from the mother stations to the daughter stations involves high risk and challenges such as keeping an eye and recording of the logistic movement of vehicles, manual maintenance of logbooks, and dependency on driver’s discipline for recording trip time & odometer reading. Manual interventions include data processing and analysis using excel sheets, planning to improve efficiency by minimizing idling time and improved scheduling of vehicles.

THINK Gas wanted to have a robust supply chain management mechanism that would effectively help in the deployment of CNG cascade vehicles, efficiently track demand patterns across different stations, determine traffic density on routes, analyse the waiting time for MCVs at the stations and also keep a check on driver’s discipline.

THINK Gas is the only city gas distribution company in India to develop and successfully implement an app and a web application - Journey Management Application (JMA), which not only helps maintain records digitally but also the online status of various vehicle parameters. A first of its kind, JMA supports English, Hindi, and other regional languages for easy comprehension, understanding and usage. The JMA is connected real-time with the company’s central control room – Nucleus that helps keep an eye on ground.

JMA allocates journey to drivers

through a system-based control mechanism, tracks MCVs efficiently and has helped THINK Gas in smooth logistics and meeting our customer demands efficiently: • Digitisation of records and moving away from inconsistent manual record keeping • Integration with SCADA for trips allocation against dynamic demand • Regular online status of all MCVs for better planning and improved efficiency • Tracking and recording of the distance travelled by the vehicle • Filling, decanting and idling time of the vehicles at CNG stations/ OMC outlets • Create different login IDs for drivers with PIN based authentications

• Installation of Front, Rear, and In-Cabin cameras for driver

authentications and to keep a check on drivers’ discipline • Use of AI to identify need for break for a driver for proper sleep

WayCool Foods and Products Pvt. Ltd.

With a vision to make the agri-supply chain demand-led, WayCool embarked on a journey to streamline farmers’ supply chain and developed a program, ‘Outgrow’. Through this innovation, the company has been able to reduce the wastage in the supply chain to less than 2%. A success story…

THE agri-supply chain, especially for fresh is supplyled as opposed to ideally being demand-led. The farmer has no visibility to what the demand will be and takes decisions based on gut, intuition and advice from other farmers on what to grow, when to grow and how much to grow. This leads to multiple issues in the supply chain such as supply issues, price volatility, wastage (India wastes 30% of the food produced). WayCool envisioned to solve this problem to flip the food value chain to a demand-led one. There were many challenges on the way such as working with farmers and incentivising them to produce based on this demand and moving the material from farm to fork.

APPROACH

WayCool realised early on that they had to work closely with both farmers at one end and retailers at the other to solve this problem. “We needed sufficient scale to get the required data for prediction and to incentivize the farmer to grow accordingly. We worked on scaling both demand and supply while the major work was done in planning. We set up a program to work closely with farmers called ‘Outgrow’. We also operate a model farm where we practice what we preach,” elaborated Charish Puri, Head – Service Business, WayCool Foods & Products Pvt. Ltd. This helped develop trust with farmers. The company also developed technology to measure supply at the farm level – a farm ERP.

On the demand side, the company introduced technology to help capture orders from customers. Tech tools such as machine learning and AI algorithms were deployed to help predict demand, which is passed back to farmers for growing and procurement.

As a result of this endeavour, the company is now able to service over

125000 customers with fill rates of >95%. They have been able to reduce the waste in the supply chain to less than 2%. More importantly, the process is fully automated and requires minimal human intervention, which means fewer errors, greater efficiency and effectiveness. Besides, the company has successfully implemented new age technology advancements to aid farmers in enhancing their reach to market.

CHROMPET CROSS DOCK

WayCool does the distribution for multiple agri products such as staples. The company operated a small cross docking facility (3500 sqft.), which required about 8 people to move about 9.2 million units, which came pre-packed from a mother DC, which is then cross docked to thousands of retailers. These units had to be cross docked and involved manual labor to unload, allocate and then load the material onto a vehicle. Achieving desired efficiency was one of the biggest concerns and there were also many errors since all the operations were manual. WayCool’s innovations team studied the operations and came up with a cross-dock decision conveyor system that was designed and made ready for operations in less than 2 months. Through this, the company can run the full operations of the cross-dock facility with just two people. In fact, the business has grown 2X with the conveyor system in place.

INTEGRATED VERTICAL PACKING MACHINE

E-commerce has grown massively during the past couple of years and the growth was especially fast during the first two phases of the pandemic. Many of the large e-commerce companies are WayCool’s customers and buy packed fruits and vegetables from them. Packing is a laborious, time consuming process and multiple people handling the fruit and vegetables destroys its freshness. The company had less than 8 hours from receiving the produce to delivering packed produce to the customer since the produce is perishable. Any delay would mean lost orders for customers and also produce that was not very fresh for end consumers. Since demand grew, it required a great deal of manpower during one shift. To reduce human intervention and increase the output exponentially (bring higher productivity and consistency of packaging), the innovations team started working on automating the packing process. They designed and built a vertical packing machine. This machine can auto-weigh and pack multiple SKUs with minimal human intervention. It can pack upto 17 packets per minute, which is 500% better in comparison to the same activity done by humans. The packing does not require human touch, thereby ensuring that the produce is fresh. It also uses a breathable laser perforated film, which keeps the produce fresh.

MOGLIX integrates technology-driven processes with its onsite supply chain capabilities to deliver 5 lakh+ SKUs of class C industrial goods for 500+ large-enterprise and 500,000+ MSME customers worldwide. In the period beginning from February 2020, the company faced the following challenges:

Lack of Comprehensive Knowledge on Prevention: The onset of the COVID19 pandemic was an unprecedented event. No enterprise, government, or consulting company had any case study to model economic and social behaviour accordingly. This skyrocketed the demand for PPE kits for frontline

Moglix

During one of the most challenging times, Moglix enabled Business Continuity through Agile Supply of Essential Goods at Scale. Here’s a snapshot of how the company achieved the daunting feat and received the distinction of being an exemplary supply chain company…

workers, healthcare professionals, security professionals, economy workers serving essential product lines.

Supply Chain Disruption Due to Lockdowns: The lockdown in India and other countries led to a wholesale supply chain disruption. It created a scarcity in the supplies of packaging, safety goods, and MRO items.

Volatile Regulatory Framework and Shifts in Governance Model: As the pan-India lockdown gave way to localised lockdowns, governance models shifted gears towards local authorities. This meant divergence across geographies and localised thumb rules on personal mobility, logistics, social distancing, and business activity. There was a need to protect vulnerable communities across India’s deep-seated pockets with adequate supplies of safety goods and PPE kits.

Visibility into real-time analytics: India’s manufacturing supply chain has less than 2% exposure to technology. Stakeholders such as suppliers, regulatory agencies, quality assurance institutions, enterprise and MSME customers, and LSPs work in offline and siloed environments that create disconnected islands of data and impede information sharing. This could have translated into an adverse selection of PPE kits and essential goods and broken-down collaboration between suppliers, logistics service partners (LSPs), and packaging service providers.

Velocity of disruption: A manual workflow slows down supply chain processes. This could have translated into each stakeholder in the PPE supply chain following, instead of being ahead of or at least at par with the curve of the pandemic. Slow responses inevitably implied losses of lives and livelihoods.

Variety of Stakeholders: Stakeholders were spread across diverse regions that were subject to a wide variety of local and federal governance models and volatile health and business regulatory frameworks. Mapping the relevance of supply chain solutions for each stakeholder in the face of incremental information flow and fragmented regulatory responses is a challenge. Such fragmentation could have led to the suboptimal deployment of manual, financial, and material resources across the supply chain.

Volume of Suppliers: Collaborating with a high-volume network of 18,000+ supplier calls for error-proof systems and processes.

The company’s approach to innovating for the challenge consisted of four distinct but connected components:

Awareness Creation: Moglix created a digital order-to-delivery platform. It reached out to enterprise and MSME buyers, government agencies, and NGOs who were searching for PPE kits of custom quality specifications and relevant suppliers with relevant capabilities to deliver the same from the single window point of contact. The company leveraged both our digital platforms and onsite supply chain networks to zero down the gaps between PPE kit buyers and suppliers. The company provided them with a one-stop digital ecosystem to centralise the supply chain journey.

Data Analytics: A PPE kit calculator was developed and deployed in the PPE orderto-delivery portal for buyers to quickly estimate the quantum of PPE kits that they may require. The PPE kit calculator had built-in artificial intelligence and smart algorithm capabilities to churn out prescriptive analytics and near realtime track and trace of orders, sourcing, and deliveries for buyers based on their inputs.

“Insights from the portal allowed us to quickly map the order size, port of destination, the local COVID19 spread in the destination against supplier capabilities, product costs, medically recommended quality standards, and regulatory requirements issued by local governments, the port of loading, and the local COVID19 spread in the sourcing region,” added Rahul Garg, CEO & Founder, Moglix. Based on the insights from the order-to-delivery portal, Moglix teams at its offices and warehouses collaborated to optimize the supply chain solutions pivoting on:

Multi-commodity: Bundling PPE kits, packaging, safety goods, coveralls, gloves, disinfectants, surface cleaners, etc., for cost-efficient full truckload (FTL) logistics capacity utilisation covering multiple destinations in a single sortie of a vehicle

Multi-modal: Deploying multiple logistical capabilities to ensure delivery within the committed turnaround time

Multi-supplier: Identifying multiple suppliers for each district to enable assured sourcing

“We developed and deployed a digital order-to-delivery platform that enrolled all stakeholders into a single ecosystem and connected the fragmented data islands to a central data lake to augment real-time visibility into data. We used robotic process automation for PR-toPO processes, billing and invoicing, GST compliance, and inventory management at our warehouses to bring speed to our supply chain solutions.”

“We deployed a Central Taskforce to consolidate various platforms, processes, systems, and physical environments into a single digital supply chain green channel. We used data analytics from our home-grown Moglix Runners app to collect on-ground intelligence to stay updated on the evolving contours of the situation across geographies. These insights enabled us to map supplier capabilities and identify suppliers with the highest scale, lowest TAT, and access to multimodal logistics across the district, state, national, and global levels of the supply chain and create an efficient and Pareto optimized supply chain,” added Garg.

He further informed, “We leveraged clean data to map PPE kit specifications of each supplier’s SKUs against purchase orders and requests for non-commercial donations to minimize the risks of order-delivery mismatch and achieve a ‘Zero Defect Zero Effect’ (ZED) goal. Between February 2020 and December 2020, we delivered 5 million PPE kits to 220 customers across 520 plants and 230 cities in India and 53 countries worldwide.”

Intugine

An innovative account of how Intugine enabled real-time multimodal supply chain visibility for an organisation with manufacturing facilities and customers across the globe with a single dashboard view of all their movements across modalities (road, ocean, rail, air, parcel)

One of Intugine's customers', having a manufacturing plant in Silvassa, India, had to ship their products globally to their counterparts or customers. While the actual transport was not an issue, trackability of the shipment from Silvassa to the closest port, from there onwards to the dock at the receivers' location and onwards again by road to the final destination, was the challenge.

This customer selected Intugine's realtime multimodal visibility solution, not just to track over-the-road movements. Intugine's solutions could now track shipments from the source to the port of loading, ocean tracking of the vessel that loaded the container, to the vehicle that took the container from the port of discharge to the customer's location. This is how their customer achieved an endto-end view of all shipments in transit through the same system.

THE APPROACH

Intugine's process was to enhance its network of carrier integrations with transporters, 3PLs, freight forwarders, and courier companies working with their client. Moreover, it also integrated with shipping lines, rail networks, and airlines to enhance multimodal visibility. "While we have an extensive network of existing integrations in place, cross-checking all the partners working with our customer and who were part of our network was the first step. If certain partners were not integrated, we had to get in touch with them and connect our systems to get visibility of their movements," highlighted Ayush Agarwal, Co-founder & Chief Business Officer, Intugine.

Talking about the hurdles faced, Ayush highlighted, "The main implementation challenge was getting all the required integrations in place for cross-border 'road' visibility. This required us to considerably extend our already existing network of integrations, as the movements were not restricted to a particular region but could be anywhere in the world. We also had to integrate with the customer's TMS, which was a slightly long process as there were many dependencies. However, we were able to do the needful in the timeframe decided successfully."

Explaining the process in detail, he added, "Our methodology was to go step by step. We started with visibility of trips that could be tracked within the country just over the road and courier/ parcel visibility for the client. We then moved to tracking container movements between countries. Then we combined the container and over-the-road visibility and could offer multimodal cross-country visibility of ocean and road movements. We then established our rail and air tracking capabilities and combined this with our ocean and road visibility product to offer a truly end-toend visibility solution that our customer very well received."

THE OUTCOME

The customer could not just gain visibility across modalities but could also share real-time ETAs of shipments with their clients and eliminate all unnecessary follow-ups and communication with the transporter or aggregator, improving the efficiency of the logistics team. The deployed system could detect any delays or issues in transport. Hence, preventive action could be taken early, reducing losses due to delayed shipment.

The customer saw the following outcomes by using the Intugine solution:

w Real-time visibility of their shipments irrespective of the mode of transport used or country of origin, or destination w End customers could also track their shipment and hence would know precisely when it is expected to arrive and could plan operations accordingly w In case of any delays or disruptions, pre-set alerts get trigged so that the customer can take necessary action to avoid any interruption in the schedule w Shorter revenue realisation cycles as customers could now recognise revenues precisely with accurate tracking of shipments which could help avoid financial losses w In the case of inbound shipment tracking, the customer could plan manufacturing based on the visibility of whether raw material would arrive in time or not w With greater visibility of shipments, teams could proactively track and ensure smooth movement of goods, reducing dwell time, detention charges, and demurrages associated with delayed deliveries.