Ex- Reliance CIO, Partners with LogiNext for His New E-tail Venture

In the era of smartphones, the delivery of needle to noodle is at a click of a button. Gone are those days when buying fresh vegetables meant traveling to the grocery markets kilometers away or waiting for the “sabziwala” who would come every morning to sell his stock. With the boom in the e-commerce industry, we saw the rise of online retail businesses. From Future Group to Godrej, companies are now moving to an online model of their physical stores. While the other retail giants are trying their luck in the e-market space for perishable products, companies like Pepper Tap and Grocermax are the alphas to disrupt this market.

Dips and Peaks: The Story of a Rising Enterprise — Grocermax at a Glance:

Co-founded by Mr. Radhakrishnan and Gaurav Juneja, Grocermax is one of the leading e-grocery stores in India. Mr. Radhakrishnan earlier served as former CIO of the India’s biggest retailer Reliance Retail Ltd and Gaurav is a former India Executive Director of French investment bank Bryan, Garnier & Co. Gaurav and Radhakrishnan both worked at Reliance Retail during 2007–08, albeit in different teams and came together in 2014 for their new e-tail venture. Grocermax has a disruptive real-time marketplace model which is essentially a hybrid of both inventory and marketplace. Grocermax competes with its contemporaries like Big Basket, Local Banya, and Grofers. BigBasket operates a large centralized distribution model whereas Grocermax has a decentralized distribution model. GrocerMax offers 8,000 SKUs (Stock Keeping Units), 800 of which are kept in stock, with the remaining 7,200 procured in real time through wholesalers, cash and carry stores and wholesale FnB market. The company did a beta launch in February 2015, and currently clock 350 orders on a daily basis with an average bill value of Rs 1,400. Grocermax offers 8,000–9,000 SKUs across 10 categories such as staples, packaged food, beverages, fruits and vegetables, dairy products, frozen items and home care. Building a retail business is not easy as it involves a very complex supply chain. The perishable nature of the goods to be delivered at the doorstep makes it even more challenging.

Friend In Need is a Friend Indeed!

With PepperTap seizing it’s operations and grofers winding up its business from various cities, Grocermax, on the other hand, achieved profitability. Grocermax sold minimum 25 items per cart and all those items on an average have 3–4 temperate zones like chill, frozen, ambient. Also, they were coming from multiple vendors, some of them were being held in inventory while some of them were being sourced as a marketplace. This makes the supply chain more complicated. The solution to this supply chain problem was in having the strongest technology stack: A tech stack which is flexible, mobile enabled and real-time integrated with the key partners.

This is where Grocermax found its logi-tech partner in LogiNext! With the high-velocity movement of merchandise, coming in from vendors to the distribution center, picking, packing, invoicing, getting this to the customer, logistics is a huge part of it. LogiNext Mile had been powerful to provide end to end supply chain needs of Grocermax in real-time without even using a single piece of paper. The information flows seamlessly from the LogiNext platform. It assigns delivery boys, enables to get feedback from them when they’re actually out in the field, all the analytics that they getting from LogiNext, all of that merges seamlessly into their platform and it enables them to offer a superlative experience to their customer. Mile saved a lot of kilometers per order by optimizing routes and suggesting the best route in real -time, which is beyond human comprehension.

Special Mention:

Continuing to add to his amazing experience Mr. Radhakrishnan further said, “We believe that technology can solve this and LogiNext has, I think, a pretty good way of doing it and we’re happy with the way that is done. Confirmation of delivery and we get a pretty solid MIS that comes to us, helps us evaluate every delivery boy who’s going out. We’re now trying to link the payment system to the efficiency of the boy to give incentives based on the data that we get from the Logistics MIS. So, I think we’ve saved money using technology and we’ve used technology without complicating life. We’ve kept it simple, we’ve laid down a process and put that process on top of the technology that LogiNext has actually provided. So, it’s been a great partnership of retail vertical knowledge, processes, and technology. So, I think we have a great partner in LogiNext”.

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