Falcon Autotech, an industrial automation provider, is one such firm which offers technological solutions for intra-logistics demands of warehousing (Reuters)

Ever wondered how an e-commerce company fulfills thousands of orders everyday—picking up the product from the warehouse nearest the delivery address, packing it properly, labelling it with the right barcode and mandatory receipts, and then ensuring that it reaches the customer in minimal time? While an army of men and machines work round the clock to make it happen, e-commerce and logistics companies are constantly on the lookout for automation products and systems to make the process faster, easier and cheaper.

Falcon Autotech, an industrial automation provider, is one such firm which offers technological solutions for intra-logistics demands of warehousing and fulfillment centers and provides end-to-end automation solutions. Its focus sectors include offline and online retail warehousing, logistics (parcel, express, and postal), FMCG, pharmaceutical, and automobiles.

“We started by solving high-speed weighing and dimensioning issues and subsequently developed a range of sortation products. Over the last few years, we have launched various automation products to cover 85% of warehousing activities. Today, we cater to businesses in eight countries worldwide,” says Vineet Baid, CEO, Falcon Autotech.

Falcon has developed innovative solutions to increase the productivity of inbound product counting operations that is done for each lot of material received. This system can be integrated with barcode scanners, online weighing stations and material receipt software systems in a company to automate the entire process of goods receiving, counting, code verification and weight checking. Not ready to sit on its achievements, Falcon is now leveraging advanced automation, robotics, and Internet of Things (IoT) concepts. It has helped clients to utilise IoT enabled robotics system to have robotic carts pick, place and deliver products from specific locations to workers. Use of IoT devices, along with sensors and radio-frequency identification also offers better visibility to the warehouse managers, letting them know the exact location of a product and the number of SKUs in each warehouse against the number of SKUs sold.

“It has helped cut down cycle times, optimise processes, reduce redundancy, increase accuracy, enabled scalability and flexibility in operations,” says Baid.

Baid believes the supply chain and intra-logistics automation business will continue to gain incremental adoption. The anticipated impact of GST, increasing labour costs, rising order volumes and increasing order complexities, etc., point towards the opportunity and the inherent need in this domain, he says. According to Kotak Institutional Equities report, India’s e-commerce sector is expected to touch $28 billion by FY 2019-20 with an estimated compounded annual growth rate of 45% over FY 2017-20.

“We are looking at a $350-500 million market in 3-5 years time,” he says.