Ninjacart Supply chain

 

Welcome, My name is Vikas S Menon and I am a 2nd year MBA student at Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore. I hope you read my previous posts. I would like to start this post with a quote by Steve Jobs which is "Creativity is just connecting things". I choose this particular quote because of its close resemblance to the topic which is the Ninjacart Supply chain. I would like to hear your feedback after going through the content.

 

Ninjacart is startup which moves 650 tonnes of fresh products from farm to retails stores in less than 12 hours. Ninjacart is solving complex structural problems such as distribution inefficiency and information asymmetry in India’s fresh food supply chain with the help of technology. On a regular day, with the help of technology and data science, Ninjacart was able to solve tougher problems to make supply chain low cost, super-fast, consistent, and reliable.

Their entire logistics is designed in such a way to deliver sustainable reliability and it is divided into two factors that are speed and efficiency throughout the processes. The daily process involves is divided into two parts. The first part involving how Ninjacart procures from farmers and segregates the items in the warehouse and delivers to the distribution center within the cities. The second part involves customer wise batching and dispatching. The important part of their logistics chain is the reverse logistics portion.

 

First Mile Delivery

 

A typical day at Ninjacart starts with farmers bringing in their produce to one of the collection centers and from there, the items are graded, weighed, batched, and dispatched to the fulfillment centers. Depending on the capacity of vehicles, products sourced and collection centers, there will be an optimal plan created by the existing algorithms to set the dispatch schedule and fix the arrival slot. The whole process begins with an end to end planning by considering the infrastructures, helpers, crates, and vehicles. With the help of helpers and vehicles, the required crates are transferred to collection centers at early hours. They also keep an inventory log of empty crates present in each collection centers which keep in mind regarding the capacity constraints of the collection centers while delivering the crates in the next cycle. All the produce is batched for the customers at the fulfillment center after receiving produced goods from the collection centers.

 

 

Middle Mile Delivery

 

As the scheduled trucks move towards the fulfillment center, the next phase of planning starts which is the delivery of products from the fulfillment center to the distribution center across the city. This plan includes the inspection of the quality of the product in the vehicles and batching the items queue wise in the distribution center and finally distribute the product to the destination. Here the distance between the collection centers as well as the distance between the fulfillment center and distribution centers are planned accordingly to minimize cost and the maximum capacity of each route.

 

Last-Mile Delivery

 

After the product reaches the distribution center, the products are picked and batched according to the customer requirements. Each store will be delivered with 8 – 9 crates products on an average. The roads and legal requirements restrict the size of the vehicles that can be used in the mentioned operations. Ninjacart used sophisticated software tools to set up the geography of the city, Start and end location of each vehicle, the maximum capacity of the vehicle, and the cost required to service every customer. This all combined to provide enough data to run the optimization engine and create delivery routes for the day. The vehicle is made to rest at the end of the delivery routes and plan for the return and recovery that is a crucial portion of Ninjacart’s supply chain. In this step, the delivery agent inspects the quality of the products returned and pick up the crates delivered on the same morning with the remaining crates from the previous night. All this data is entered into the system and this will help them to get a picture of how many crates will reach the distribution channel. After the whole cycle is over, they will start planning the dispatch for the first-mile delivery vehicles. Finally, the circular journey of a crate is completed in the system.