Case Study On Supply Chain Management At Flipkart

A Case Study on Supply Chain Management

At

Flipkart

Submitted By: Section A

Sonam Kardam PGP/17/346

Prologue

Flipkart’s highly publicized ‘Big billion Day’ sale failed to garner the positive response it had expected. The failure was attributed to many factors like IT glitches, unanticipated scale of traffic on the website, ill thought out deals and above all insufficient sourcing of products.

The purpose of this case study is to study the supply chain management by Flipkart and understand how Flipkart benefits from it

The e-Commerce industry

What is e-commerce

The traditional model of buying and selling, called the brick and mortar model involves physical stores displaying goods being offered by the sellers

Flipkart was again the first online website to offer 24*7 customer service. Thus Flipkart with its high level of services has literally reinvented the wheel in the world of ecommerce by setting up new standards of providing customer delights in terms of best prices, wide range to select from and timely services. The goal of Flipkart is to be the Complete Ecommerce Website.

Supply Chain Management at Flipkart

Teams/ Departments

The company comprises of the following teams

• Product and Technology: Responsible for managing the ERP system and the website. The website is maintained using a unique technique wherein more than 1 copy of website design exist simultaneously and the changes are continuously monitored to add or delete content from the website

• Business Development Team: Responsible for deciding pricing, deals and other strategies

• Operations Team: Responsible for the supply chain aspects of the business like procurement, warehousing etc

• Customer Support Team: Responsible for website guidance and resolving customer

amount credited as points into the customer’s account

Procurement

Flipkart started with the consignment model wherein the retailer paid for the good, to the supplier only when the goods were bought and delivered to the end customer. But now Flipkart has adopted the Marketplace Model wherein Flipkart doesn’t hold any inventory and just delivers the shipments to buyers who buy directly from the sellers (around 50 in number).Procurement can be for either inventory (75%orders) which are pre ordered items from low demand elastic and fast selling but long shelf life items; or JIT (25% orders) for fulfilling immediate demand.

Sourcing of the orders occurs at either Regional level by Regional Procurement teams or at Central level by Central Procurement team. The Regional procurement team has its own network of local suppliers.

Warehouse

Flipkart has its warehouses spread across the country.& in number , they are located at Delhi ,Mumbai, Kolkata, Noida, Chandigarh, Bangalore and Pune. Flipkart has a Warehouse Management System (WMS) whose major components are

• Inward Processing: Collecting goods delivery from supplier, inspection for Quality Control and initial