Category Archives: Warehousing

Spoton Logistics has expanded its logistics network by scaling up logistics hubs in Nagpur, Bengaluru, and Chennai respectively. The hubs offer comprehensive facilities to expand the horizon of deliveries during the festive season and support future growth in the regions. With its comprehensive delivery network, Spoton Logistics will continue to enable timely deliveries for eCommerce and retail giants in India. Currently enabling the delivery of 17,500 consignment notes (around 1,40,000 pieces) each day, the company is expecting a significant surge this festive season with Retail, eCommerce, and FMCG sectors driving this spike. “2020 has been an uphill battle for mankind. Months into the pandemic, businesses and consumers have found their way through to the new normal. With an increased adoption of e-commerce in the country, companies are betting big on online sales this festive season. The just-in-time expansion will help us significantly increase scalability for our customers while our web portal for them would ensure paperless and quick transactions. Moreover, Spoton Logistics is uniquely positioned as one of the most agile, innovative, and forward-thinking companies that can cater to the logistics needs of businesses in the current challenging business environment,” says, Abhik Mitra, MD & CEO, Spoton Logistics. “We ended the month of June and July with a recovery of greater than 90 per cent of pre-lockdown figures, and have surpassed our pre-COVID revenues during September. With the onset of the festive season, we are poised to further build on this momentum and have designed an effective roadmap for the same,” he adds.

In order to cater to the upcoming festive season demand, Gati-KWE has revamped its express distribution, warehousing, and supply chain management services. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the company expects robust 50 per cent growth in volumes during the October-December festive season. The company is actively building capacity, strengthening its supply chain and delivery capabilities to cater to the expected volume rush. “We are further augmenting our express logistics capacity by two-fold for the upcoming festive season. Our decision to expand resources and service bandwidth by hiring additional trucks is a consequence of our experience and understanding of the market underlined by our commitment to efficiently accommodate the increased and dynamic demands of our customers during this period. As we go about doubling our capabilities, we are also giving utmost attention to COVID-19 care and safety and ensuring 100% adherence to precautions for our staff members, operators, partners, and all other stakeholders working with us,” said Bala Aghoramurthy, Deputy Managing Director, Gati-KWE Ltd. The company is aggressively promoting various offers to drive sales. These intense efforts are expected to significantly drive logistics volumes and demand in the festive season. Additionally, the changes in buying patterns suggest that consumer sentiment in India is gradually improving. According to the recent Mintel research findings, almost 30% of Indian consumers surveyed, plan to spend more on clothes and accessories followed by other goods.

Sharing his views on warehouse consolidation, Naveen Rawat, Director & Co-founder, Holisol Logistics, says, “With GST, the idea was to merge all the warehouses into two or three hubs and serve the entire country because the speed to market was not even a differentiator at that point of time. The emergence of e-commerce has done that today though GST allows you to consolidate all into one, the key business differentiator is to serve your customer faster than your competitor. Consolidation is a long-term process and at the same time the market is evolving and going towards two-hour delivery or 90-minutes delivery and hence more stock points are required.”

Kool-ex has partnered with IndoSpace to build customised, Good Distribution Practice (GDP)/and Good Warehousing Practice (GWP) compliant, temperature controlled, Pharma Distribution Centres across the country. The spread of services will include warehousing, secondary distribution, passive packaging and blockchain for end-to-end tractability of pharma products, apart from its core existing business of providing temperature-controlled transportation. IndoSpace has pan-India network of Grade A warehouses, and the partnership with Kool-ex will enable IndoSpace to venture into pharma warehousing. As part of the deal, Kool-ex and IndoSpace will jointly design and set up three warehouses in Phase-I by 2021 in proximity to Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. Kool-ex has plans to setup 10 to 11 warehouss by 2023, making it the largest Pharma storage footprint in the country.

Spread over more than 2 lakh square feet area, Amazon has launched third Fulfilment Centre (FC) in Ahmedabad. The expansion in Gujarat is a part of the company’s plans announced in July to add 10 new fulfilment centres and expand seven existing sites, across India. With this infrastructure expansion, Amazon now offers a storage capacity of more than 1.5 million cubic feet across three fulfilment centres to its more than 80,000 sellers in Gujarat. Amazon recently launched a new sort centre and expanded the capacity of an existing sort centre to ensure faster and reliable deliveries for customer orders in Gujarat. Prakash Kumar Dutta, Director of Fulfilment Centres & Supply Chain, Amazon India, said, “Gujarat is an important market for Amazon India and we are delighted to further invest and expand our infrastructure in the State. With this expansion, SMBs in Gujarat will benefit both in terms of economic growth and reach to a wider customer base. With the new launches, we will be able to continue to seamlessly cater to the growing demand from customers so they can stay home and stay safe while creating thousands of job opportunities in the state.”

Talking about the future of warehousing industry, John Thomas, Group Director, Realistic Realtors & Reach Promoters and Director at CIRIL (Commercial Real Estate Advisors), says, “Warehousing has always been a centre of many sectors, whether it is FMCG, retail, fashion or 3PL companies. Warehouse will not go anywhere, it’s here to stay and become stronger. This entire COVID-19 disruption has made us think on various innovations, initiatives which we should do for our better future such as Grade-A warehouses with better facility and automation for more supplies. Today, we are facing a difficulty of getting a good and ready Grade-A warehouse in a decent location. In Delhi, we don’t have a legally compliant warehouse, the government needs to get in line and give that support and make it smoother for a warehouse to get legally compliant.”

To address a variety of storage facilities for both new and existing typologies such as logistics parks, warehouses, cold storages and other storage spaces, CII-Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) has digitally launched the IGBC Green Logistics Parks & Warehouses Rating System. Being the 27th rating of the Indian Green Building Council, the rating system addresses the national priorities and is developed in congruent with national & several state policies. It is developed aligning the requirements with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. By adopting the rating tool, the projects would achieve various tangible and intangible benefits including energy & water savings and health & well-being of occupants. The rating system was launched by Leena Nandan, Secretary, Department of Consumer Affairs, Government of India, V Suresh, Chairman – IGBC & Former CMD, HUDCO and A M Visvanathan, Chair – IGBC Green Logistics Parks & Warehouses, Executive Vice President and Business Head – Godrej Storage Solutions, Godrej & Boyce. Suresh said, “The rating system is a ‘first-of-its-kind and exclusively developed to address Logistics Parks, Warehouses, Cold Storages and other storage facilities in India. The rating addresses unique green concepts such as design of docking bays and dock levellers, electric vehicles for indoor material handling, GHG inventory & mitigation measures, transport modal mix, vehicular routing, parking for service vehicles, green packaging and basic amenities for staff & drivers”. He adds, “Considering the present demand in the logistics sector, the sector is expected to contribute one billion sq ft of registered green footprint by 2022. The aspiration for the Council is to have 10 billion sq ft of registered green footprint by 2022.” According to Visvanathan said, “The objective of the rating system is to …

Explaining why technology cannot be disruptive for the industry, Amit Malakar, Chief Customer Officer, Welspun One, shares, “With disruptive technology coming in the picture, we have come a long way from godowns to warehouse with cubic capacity. The next level of disruption probably came in where the goods started coming to us and we did not need to go to pick the goods with the help of Automated Storage & Retrieval System (ASRS). The next level is now we could manage everything sitting at home with few people at the site but technology is helping us to manage lot of things remotely. With technology we are able to do things much more efficiently.”

Commenting on should we be investing more on technology to sustain in business, Amit Malakar, Chief Customer Officer, Welspun One, says, “Technology is going to be a very important part of our lives. Everyone needs to be digitally savvy and make sure that their supply chain is resilient enough to reach the market through their warehouses. We have seen FMCG companies who were never on the e-commerce platform are now looking at digital distribution strategy in a big way.”

Amazon India expanded its fulfilment infrastructure in Telangana with the opening of two new fulfilment centres in Hyderabad. With this infrastructure, Amazon.in now offers storage capacity of more than 4.5 million cubic feet spread across four fulfilment centres to its more than 23,000 sellers in Telangana. It has also expanded an existing sort centre to offer an overall sorting area of more than one lakh square feet, in Telangana. This expansion will help sellers offer a wider selection and enable faster deliveries of customer orders within the region and neighbouring states ahead of the upcoming festive season. The expansion in Telangana is a part of the company’s recently-announced plans to add 10 new fulfilment centres and expand seven existing sites, across India. “Amazon and Telangana have partnered on several initiatives since the commencement of our operations in India with our largest fulfilment centre in the country located in Hyderabad. We are delighted to extend the partnership further with this additional investment in the State helping us deliver safely to our customers at their doorstep,” said, Prakash Kumar Dutta, Director of Fulfilment Centres & Supply Chain, Amazon India.