Prateek Agrawal, who leads product for supply chain planning at Flipkart, shared valuable insights into their approach to building robust and effective planning systems. Flipkart, delivering to over 20,000 PIN codes and covering 99% of India's population, has built an extensive in-house planning product. Here are key takeaways from his presentation:

The Importance of Planning

In today's dynamic environment, effective planning is crucial. Customer demands are rapidly evolving, and supply chains are becoming increasingly complex. Companies need to be agile and intelligent in their planning to meet diverse customer needs.

Flipkart's Planning Principles

Flipkart's planning systems are built around three core principles:

• Connected: A single source of truth, system-driven inputs, and a clear link from plan to action.
• Agile: High-frequency planning, low-latency inputs, and robust monitoring.
• Intelligent: Best-in-class modelling, high-quality inputs, granular planning, and a seamless human-in-the-loop mechanism.

Key Elements for Effective Planning

Agrawal highlighted four critical elements:

1. Single Source of Truth: A unified plan across the organization is essential. Hidden plans and disparate systems lead to inefficiencies. Make sure the consensus plan percolates down to every part of your organisation.
2. Increased Planning Frequency: Technology enables more frequent planning, leading to increased accuracy. Daily or weekly planning cycles are becoming essential in today's fast-paced world.
3. Planning at Every Level: Granular planning unlocks opportunities for optimization at all levels of the organization. Empowering teams with detailed forecasts allows them to innovate and improve their operations.
4. Empowering Human Planners: Planning systems should augment, not replace, human planners. Explainability of forecasts and provisions for human intervention are critical.

Granularity Example

• Category, Country, Month: Typical executive-level planning.
• Product, Region, Week: A common planning level.
• Product, PIN Code, Day: Enables last-mile hubs to plan manpower better.
• Product, Neighbourhood, Hour: Allows for better payouts for gig workers.

By focusing on these principles and key elements, Flipkart has built a supply chain planning system that is connected, agile, and intelligent, enabling them to meet the diverse needs of their customers and maintain their position as a leading e-commerce player in India.