Bigbasket is re-engineering its supply chain, Now the company planning to set vending machines and smaller distribution centers in selected cities across India. With $100M budget Bigbasket all set strengthen its supply chain system and will reduce delivery time.
The company wants to reduce delivery time, “We want to enable two-hour delivery in top 10 cities that we operate in by July this year. For that, we have been investing in strengthening our distribution centers. We have 18 large and 80 smaller distribution centers together with our resellers and this will be ramped to 20 large and 100 smaller ones by June this year,” according to a PTI report quoting BigBasket co-founder Vipul Parekh as published by BusinessLine.
Bigbasket is backed by Chinese company Alibaba, Founded in 2011, now servicing in 25 cities across India. The new investment will place the company in the unicorn club (companies with valuation of USD 1 billion and above). It will also help the Bengaluru-based company to further penetrate into existing markets with more investments in the first mile, scaling-up of its supply chain and for developing new reseller channels
Bigbasket recently raised $150 million in funding led by Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, CDC Group and Alibaba Group.
With latest technologies, like AI, IoT, robotics process automation and blockchain supply chain is going to evolve fast. With increased automation, supply chain is going through
Bigbasket also investing towards setting up unmanned vending machines – BB Instant – in office and apartment complexes. The company sees a huge potential of these machines. Customers can use their app to access the machine and buy products. The only human intervention is in re-stocking. We have already placed such machines at 200 sites in Bengaluru and over the next one year, we want to have 2,000 such sites across the 10 large cities where we operate,” Parekh said.
“We have been re-engineering our supply chain to allow for faster delivery to our resellers and to reduce the time from farm to our customers. This coupled with an expansion in our range of private label products will create a solid foundation for growth in both revenue and profitability,” he told the news site.