Leaders of various retail businesses discussed supply chain and its impact on the last mile experience, which in turn affects repeat business and revenues at the Internet Commerce Summit 2022
Bengaluru: Supply Chains today are differentiating factors that help companies deliver a fast and delightful last-mile experiences, said business leaders discussing ‘How can Supply Chains be a Revenue Enabler? at the Internet Commerce Summit (ICS) 2022 on Wednesday.
Owned or outsourced?
While the panellists discussed the rising importance of supply chains to a business, they also debated on whether supply chains should be owned or outsourced.
“Companies like ours deport operating systems, in a supply chain context. Today, we get access to the entire supply chain as a service. Most of the new age companies do not own their supply chains. There are many brands that are extremely savvy when it comes to leveraging on third party, that could be warehousing for storage or the logics and infrastructure,” said Lieutenant Commander (Dr) Ashvini Jakhar, Founder & CEO of Prozo, a warehouse service & fulfillment solution provider.
“For us owning the supply chain is far more important,” said Puneet Tripathi, Head of Data Science, Wakefit. He made clear that having as less as warehouses is suitable for brands that sells large products that are prone to damage.
Supply chain and Q-commerce
Supply chains are extremely critical to quick commerce businesses as it is their efficiency that helps quick commerce deliver on their promise of delivery in minutes.
Yash Dayal, CIO of Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app felt that companies should look at use cases when setting up and managing their supply chains. He informed that Zepto has a use case that sets it apart from other brands. In every city, Zepto has a ‘mother app’, which is a traditional large e-commerce warehouse.
“What makes Zepto different is that to fulfil the 10-minute promise we have delivery houses set up in every neighbourhood. These are small hubs of 2,000 sq ft. We have to custom built our system to be able execute in an efficient manner,” said Dayal.
On models
The pandemic compelled every business to redesign their supply chains. Dr. Anil Chinnabhander, Senior VP- Retail Planning & Supply Chain, Landmark Group felt that Covid-19 taught them that having different inventory models and warehouses was defective to the overall profitability of the company, instead clubbing inventories was the smart choice.
Manoj Kansal, CTO of Kitabali, a social commerce platform, spoke about his company’s practice of building community-based supply chain. “We are building a community-based supply chain, which is profitable. We involve our customers and build warehouses in their own place. For Supply chain management, we optimize the cost and build a profitable model,” he said.
The session was moderated by Madhav Kasturia, Founder of ZFW, which runs a tech-enabled network of dark stores and tech stack to help D2C and F&B brands grow. Other panelists in the discussion included, JP Mishra, Country Manager- India, Newland AIDC and Aniket Bose, Chief Supply Chain Officer, DaMensch.
The session was one of many insightful sessions at the sixth edition of ICS 2022. The only event of its-kind for the country’s e-commerce and m-commerce industry ICS is a convergence of new-age retailers from online retail, brick-and-mortar stores, product and services commerce and omnichannel.
