Lean Management has proven to be a robust methodology of continuous improvement wherein the focus is to identify and eliminate the MUDAS or Wastes throughout the process under consideration so as to improve the overall business and more importantly sustain this improvement. In the e-commerce industry, price and quality of the product along with delivery speed are the most critical levers influencing customer choice. To ensure a good quality product at competitive price delivered within the shortest lead time together constitute the key differentiating factors in today’s highly competitive e-commerce industry.

The Fulfilment Center lies at the focal point of this industry and is clearly the key asset in the whole e-commerce supply chain, which stores and processes tens of thousands of different SKUs from various sellers and suppliers. Triggered by a customer order, the correct SKU is picked, packed and dispatched from the fulfilment center within few mins to ensure that it is delivered within the promised time to the customer. It can be clearly inferred that an improvement towards optimality in fulfilment center operations would have a positive domino effect on the supply chain both upstream and downstream of the fulfilment center. Hence, we look to examine the lean methodology in a fulfilment center context.

Presently, multiple lean methodology derivatives are being used at the fulfilment center such as 5S, FIFO, Single Piece Flow, Line Balancing, JIT, JIDOKA, Multi Skilling in every process while receiving the material from a supplier or seller so that the correct material is unloaded, inspected and in-warded inside the fulfilment center and stored at the desired location with appropriate identification both visual and also in the warehouse management system (WMS). Although the material is received in Lots or as a Bulk shipment, it is pushed into a single piece flow or broken down in to smaller lots so as to allow for the all the activities at the fulfilment center which are largely sequential in nature to be balanced within the TAKT time with a view to optimize warehouse infrastructure and other limited resources. Another important aspect of the warehouse processes is to ensure the flow of quality of the product through various visual check points and system poka-yoke such as barcode scanning, which help to ensure that the correct product is delivered to customer.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the fulfilment center operations and explains the applicability of specific lean management techniques in operations across the process flow which occurs in a fulfilment center. The paper goes on to present a pre v/s post implementation view of these techniques to get an understanding of realized goodness. Further, it presents a scope for the applicability of lean techniques in new areas and how this can help attain successful upgradation from status quo.