When Things Don’t Fall In Place For You, Better Fall In A Warehouse!

Widening bottlenecks, study and documentation of ‘As is’ Inbound and Outbound processes, Process redesign, Analysis of data pulled out of ERP to get a hold of indices like fill rate, inventory days, inventory turnover, cross-docking opportunities and many more were some of the interesting things which I got involved in. Stellar it was. I mean the company I interned with - Stellar Value Chain Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Headquartered in Mumbai and set up in 2016, this third-party logistics provider is growing with a clear vision (of a veteran in supply chain management) of transforming the supply chain of this country. So much so that every time it wins a contract, the National Anthem is played inside its office premises to reinstate this vision. Strange but exciting!

I was posted in one of its warehouses in Panvel (which served two of its clients- one from the luggage industry and the other from the furnishing industry) going through all the emotions, learnings and experiences. I also got a chance to interact with some of the heavy weights of supply chain industry working in different functional domains of Business Development, Solution Design & Project Implementation. In the later half of my internship, I was involved with the Solution Design team for analysing the supply chain of one of the footwear companies in India.

One thing which was obvious for me during this internship was that the logistics sector, especially in India, is a people intensive domain. Managing operations and technologies in this sector will require budding managers to be first ‘people centric’ and then ‘process centric’ rather than the other way round. Managing on floor ‘workforce’ rather than on floor ‘processes’ would be the most sought-after goal. Because, ‘once the right mindset comes in, processes will follow automatically’ was one of the many things that I learnt from my reporting manager, who also happened to be an Ex-Amazon senior manger and a visiting faculty in one of the most reputed management colleges in Mumbai. Finally, I got my answer to that question which had popped up at the start of my internship. Was a resounding ‘Yes’! Signing off...