| |December 201819CIOReviewIn order to fasten the speed of adoption of WMS, tell-ing the team how they would benefit from WMS would bring about a change in the adoption. For example, hav-ing an HR management system that would translate the gain person would have is an effective way to increase the adoption of technology. What I have observed is that the sales teams are very keen at adopting technology; they were the first ones to move to pagers, to have automatic order systems, having orders being picked up on black-berries all because they see a personal benefit to them. They had to spend a few hours in the market and do more work and gain more bonus at the end of the month.There is a big scope for improvement and productiv-ity gains by implementing robotics technology and taking warehousing to the ultimate level as in the west, the point being that India has a very basic warehousing industry, for us to take that giant leap is going to be very complex. In the immediate future, I do not see the robotics or IoT playing a huge role in the industry but there can be some centers of excellence which can demonstrate what all can happen as India is like a brilliant adopter of technology. If they see value, they'll immediately pounce on it and adopt it. Rising adoption of technologyAs far as India is concerned, we have not even seen the tip of the iceberg as far as warehouse management technology is concerned. From the supply chain point of view, we are very basic in terms of adoption of technology, in the next 3-5 years, I see a huge change in terms of adoption of technology, number of warehouses which will go for a sophisticated warehouse management, systems, having automated vehicles in the warehouse or even different picking systems that pick to voice and so on and so forth. The cost of supply chain in an Indian company would be anything between 4-6 percent depending on the kind of products and operations they have. There is a strong possibility that warehousing technology implementation, if done in the right way by leveraging the fact that we have GST, would play a huge role in unlocking the cost. We could have upto 2 percent reduction in the supply chain cost, overall a significant proportion of that will be coming in from the warehousing.We, as people in the corporate world, have to find a way to present the right benefit of technology to managements, which is where we falter. We need to understand that the industry in India is not very different from the other companies. We should see the cross benefit analysis in the right way in the business case. We should present it in the right way to the senior management who allocate funds. There is a big scope for improvement and productivity gains by implementing robotics technology and taking warehousing to the ultimate level as in the west
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