Harsh Garg, Head of Product Management & Partnerships, Nido Machineries Pvt. Ltd., in an exclusive conversation with Claus from Food Infotech spoke about their product offerings that find their applications across a range of industries, including the F&B Industry, apart from sharing more details on their recent innovation that is completely customizable and aimed at addressing the problems/challenges faced by businesses operating in the F&B Industry, including their future expansion plans.
Edited Excerpts Below:
Would you begin by sharing a little about NIDO Automation and its offerings for us?
NIDO Group is a manufacturer, system integrator and solutions provider focusing on Intralogistics Mechanization and Automation Solutions. Our offerings include a wide range of equipment/solutions and technologies that find their applications across a range of industries, which include logistics, E-Commerce, FMCG, Retail, Warehousing, Pharmaceuticals and a few more industries.
We had recently displayed some of our predominant solutions at the India Warehousing Show last month. These include parcel sortation and order consolidation solutions for multiple industries that include E-Commerce, Quick Commerce as well as the Food and Beverage Industry. Along with these solutions, we also have a varied set of offerings like profiling systems, conveyor systems, Pick/Put-to-light systems, etc.
A bit about any of the recent solutions introduced by your company for the F&B Industry? What problems do they solve for the businesses operating in F&B Industry?
We’ve recently introduced our latest innovation into the market, which we refer to as ASTRO-Grid based Sorting and Fulfillment System that has a varied range of use cases, including for the F&B Industry. This solution assists the F&B Industry either when there is a need for order consolidation (on a region OR a dark store level) or can be used for the sortation of consolidated order basis a pre-defined logic, which is completely customizable. Basically, order consolidation is the primary use case in a fulfillment center kind of an environment.
When we take the example of Zepto or Blinkit or any Quick Commerce Company for that matter, their problem is that from the minute anybody places an order on their app, it has to be delivered within the next 10 minutes. Similarly, there are thousands of products that are stored in a highly constrained, cluttered space. Hence, there arises a challenge for anyone to find any given product, as the delivery is required to be made within a maximum time period of 10 minutes. This is where our ASTRO can come handy. The operator would be able to use it like a vending machine. While he will be waiting outside to pick whatever that is actually needed to be sent out, the tote consisting of that package will arrive at the pick-up point. The material that would be picked by the operator would subsequently be sent for delivery.
In a way, we have a solution that addresses the problem of finding the product/material inside a cluttered warehouse. While it makes inventory management easy, it also takes care of the hygiene aspect in a way by checking and detecting if any product/item is about to reach its end of shelf life period which is common in FMCG products. It tackles a big challenge, which is checking the expiry date of the products/items. Our software would be able to detect if any product/item is about to get spoilt. It would help keep the store manager informed of those products/materials that are required to be excluded from the warehouse. In a way, a big problem that the F&B Industry is likely to face is being solved by us, owing to the presence of our in-house made software and in-house R&D and manufactured product, ASTRO.
We are already in talks with multiple companies in the Quick Commerce and Food and Beverage space regarding the problem statement that I had mentioned earlier and we hope to serve more businesses in the F&B Industry and other industries as well in the coming days.
How has the feedback been from most of your customers for this solution?
The initial adaptation of the solution has been beyond satisfactory so far. However, since the product is new for us and for the market, we’ll have to wait and see if the one we launched needs some design amendments to make it more operator friendly. This is also one of the qualities that separates NIDO from its competitors that as a team, we continuously try to better our products and make it adapt to the environment it is sent in and not make the environment adjust as per the automation. Having said that, so far, the adaptation has been good and the feedback has been encouraging. We are soon expecting NIDO to be present in dark stores for food and beverage businesses.
Can you share a little on some of your hot-selling solutions?
Presently, we have divided our automation solutions into 5 major categories of products. First, we have our CAPELLA, which is a range of Vision-based Induction and Profiling Systems that are used in weighing and dimensioning of both small and big parcels.
Our second line of solutions, DENEB is a range of parcel sortation systems that are all carrier-based for parcel sortation into either a 3rd party logistics, a warehousing or an express company. The idea behind innovating Deneb was to help the clients with a system which is modular, requires less capital expenditure and does not require a long list of pre-requisites like a traditional automation solution.
The third solution, ASTRO is the one that is closest to us and is our newest line of order consolidation and parcel sortation solutions which comes in multiple configurations. It is a completely customizable product that has slowly started gaining acceptance in the market.
Other than this, we also have Canopus that includes all forms of conveyor automation solutions and Antares, being our Pick and Put-to-Light Systems. In the recent past, we have seen the quickest adoption for both of our products, CAPELLA and DENEB. Both of them have been our hot selling products. Our USP is that we do not believe in one solution fits all kind of offerings, but understand the need of the hour and our customers and innovate accordingly.
Are you working on any new solutions currently?
As of today, our main focus is to mature ASTRO as a product by figuring out all different configurations that it can be used in and building solutions basis that. The construct of ASTRO has opened up a line of thought for us, wherein, we think that the same product in a slightly different configuration can be used as a tote shuttle as well, which is what we are now working on. If and when we hit the mark with this idea, there is a chance we can revolutionize the way tote picking/placement is done in the aisles in warehouses.
What are your strategies to market your products in a price-sensitive market like India?
India, being a price sensitive market has been an advantage for us because as far as warehouse automation is concerned, the country has only seen a very limited range of orthodox automation solutions which come with their own set of challenges of coming at unimaginably high cost, requires high maintenance and is almost impossible to scale.
With more and more Indian businesses adopting automation faster in the past decade, there is no requirement for any automation that costs INR 8 crores or 10 crores. Most of the businesses only need a solution that helps them start their automation journey and scale automation as they grow. This is where what we offer serves as a perfect answer to our clients’ problems.
Our solutions are CapEx friendly, modular enough to scale as per the client’s dynamic nature of business and requires close to zero run time maintenance because it has very less moving parts. And we continue to innovate on similar lines only. All of the solutions we make are designed keeping in mind a young company somewhere that is in dire need of a customized automation solution for their operations and is not in a condition to pay a hefty price for it.
Can you let us know more about your team, including your after sales and service network?
We have the strongest after sales service team in the domain comprising of 100+ service engineers based out of different geographies across the country. Our after sales quality and efficiency is something that we take immense pride in. It is also one of the reasons why we have been able to continue keep a few of our clients satisfied for over 10 years now. Doesn’t matter which geography our clients are in, if there is a problem they are facing, we are always available be it on call or in person to solve it for them.
Our team is a combination of a group of senior technical leads stationed centrally, followed by on the ground service engineers who are permanently stationed in different geographies. There is also a 24 hour on-call support, including 24 hours on-site support, if necessary for all of our clients. Just to mention, we provide service support for not only NIDO products, but the products which are manufactured by other OEMs as well. I am also delighted to mention that we have never come across a customer who is not happy with the way NIDO service team has been helping them with unorthodox problem statements on the ground round-the-clock.
What’s your company’s USP?
I would say that amongst our many USPs, there are 3 things that separate NIDO from its competitors. First are our solutions, which are designed specifically keeping in the kind of operations and operators that are going to be using them and the actual pain points of our clients. Our solutions are not a small catalog of orthodox systems which are expensive and impossible to adopt for everyone. Our clients include organizations who are adopting automation for the first time and mostly want to learn as their operations scale.
Secondly, our customer service is another USP of ours, wherein, we make sure that our service engineer is easily accessible and available to address the customer problems 24*7. And lastly, we do not sell one product that fits all. We only customize our solutions for our customers after understanding their business requirements.
What are some of the markets that you’ve planned to target in the coming months?
We are presently looking to expand our presence in Australia, New Zealand, Middle East and South East Asia, particularly in countries such as Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Philippines, since it is a huge potential for automation players like us in these geographies. At the same time, after speaking with a few of our customers, we realize that these markets are also not too different from India in terms of the operational challenges, operational efficiencies and the need for affordable and scalable automation.
