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Network Intelligence & Orchestration

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About Myself
Senthil M, Director of Products, Fulfillment Experience @Flipkart
- 8 years in product management @Flipkart
- Scratch to Scale Experience
- Expertise in product development across supply chain facets
- Fulfillment Services
- Transportation & logistics
- 3PL management
- Taxation, Compliance & Accounting
- Supply planning
- Network design
- Inventory planning
- Cash management solutions
- Optimisation models
- Geo Information Systems
- Supply chain monetisation
LinkedIn
email: senthilm@flipkart.com

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Presentation Flow
1. Operating Landscape
2. Network Intelligence
3. Illustration

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Operating Landscape (1/2)
Product Categories
(Books, Furniture, Grocery,
Pharma? …..)
Supply Chain Services
(Scheduled, Next-Day, Reverse
pickups, Installation … )
Product Attributes
(Multi-parts, Fragile, Stacking, Lots,
Highvalue, Inflammable.. )
Fulfillment Models
(JIT, Preorder, Inventory, Brand warehouses,
Omnichannel, Hyperlocal…. )
Customer Segments
(Plus, Metro, Millennials, Women, Working
family)
Demand
Volatility

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Operating Landscape (2/2)
Many Warehouses hosting
millions of products
100s of thousand Sellers
with their unique working
models
Covering 20k+ pincodes Large Field Force (Delivery
executives, installation
executives, agents)
100s of Partners/Vendors Millions of Packages 1000s of Vehicles carrying
tons of load Crores of Cash & Digital
payments. Adding Petty
cash..
Supply
Volatility

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Flow the Orders…
Incoming demand Warehouse Sortation
Piling Parcels Transportation Routing Implications (?)

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What can be done better?
AWARENESS -> CONTROL -> INTELLIGENCE. => ORDERLY, PREDICTABLE
- Where should i reserve Inventory in the network?
- When should i release the inventory in the network?
- Should i process real-time (or) batch it?
- What should be the shipment flow path?
- What should i do when there is an exception across the network (external, internal,
customers)?
- When should i initiate a transport connection from hubs?
- What choices or flexibility should i offer to customer?
GUIDING QUESTIONS ?

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Logical view
Demand Prediction Engine
Activities/Process (Lead-Time &
Throughput)
Service Composition & Capacity
Management
Business/Customer Intelligence
Real-time Fulfillment Decisions
Service Offerings & Pricing
Real-time Events/Insights
Network Orchestration
Customer
Choices
Execution
System ..
Execution
System ..
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What is Network Intelligence & Orchestration means?
It’s a Constraint-aware planning system
- that creates profitable distribution decisions with visibility into network wide
inventory & capacity
- iterative planning & execution based on real-time events/disruptions

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High-level System view

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Flow the Orders again…
Incoming demand Batch Orders Planned Picking
Sort for a Plan Routing Implications (?)

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Inventory Reservation & Release – Decision Science
● Which Warehouse to select?
▪ Consider future orders (demand forecast)
▪ Inventory Allocation for critical demands
▪ Identify flow paths & create choices
▪ Cost Vs SLA trade-offs
● How to batch orders?
▪ Flow path identification
▪ Transport Connection balancing
▪ Transport Connection grouping
▪ Risk assessments
▪ Backward propagation for zero queues.
▪ Forward pass for higher utilization