Addressing one of the biggest sustainability challenges of increasing electronic waste for one of the largest global e-commerce marketplaces. The brand is in the business of exchanging used mobile phones for new ones and providing discounts to customers on new purchases. It was looking for a solution to quality-grade used mobile phones before reselling in the secondary market. With Increff WMS, it was able to perform quality grading at the SKU level, based on audit results, and with inventory serialization, it generated items ID stickers for marking the inventory accurately.
Problem statement
With the increase in the size of the secondary market and demand for refurbished products, it is imperative for brands to emphasize the actual quality of the product in an honest and transparent way, to build customer trust. The leading e-commerce giant wanted a technology system that could help in the proper grading of used mobiles, based on hardware and software quality, and sell to B2B buyers on OLX, Quicker, retailer’s e-commerce platform, etc. They were looking for a WMS that could enable rapid integration and get them started as quickly as possible with inventory serialization for 100% tracking.
Solution
Increff WMS custom application (tool-kit) for grading mechanism facilitated:
- Full rapid integration with Increff WMS (core system)
- Thorough quality check and grading of SKUs based on audit results
- Individual item ID sticker for tagging to product, and tracking purposes
- Configurable audit questions and rules for quality checking
- Uploading bulk audit forms into a toolkit to speed up the audit process
Impact
The custom application was created and deployed to go live before the Diwali sale, in 2019, and enable smooth functioning of the exchange program at scale with real-time inventory updates.
- The project went live with one of the retailers participating in the exchange program. After the success of the project, a much larger retailer in the exchange program also integrated Increff WMS to upscale and streamline the reselling process.
- Currently, two large retailers, with warehouses in Bangalore and Mumbai are integrated with Increff WMS to build efficient warehousing for the refurbished mobile phone market.
- Increff WMS coupled with the custom application has been online for more than 2.5 years without any downtime or any major issue.
Impactful numbers achieved in the second half of 2021
- Average mobiles, per month, packed for vendors since May 2021 – 11.2 k
- Maximum mobiles packed for vendors, in a month – 16.9 k
