Flipkart: Delighting Billion Indian Customers through Supply Chain Optimization

Organized by INFORMS.

The Flipkart Group, one of India’s foremost digital commerce entities, serves over 500 Mill registered users and offers a vast selection of over 150 million products, connecting customers with 1.4 million sellers. Flipkart facilitates daily deliveries of millions of shipments across 19,000 pin codes. To keep pace with rapid growth and the evolving ecosystem of e-commerce in India, Flipkart embarked on a transformational overhaul of its supply chain planning technology in 2021.

This transformation led to the development of an advanced, fully integrated supply chain planning platform, built on machine learning and operations research. The platform comprises two core layers: forecasting and optimization. The forecasting layer leverages a suite of statistical and machine learning techniques to produce multi-level demand forecasts. The optimization layer converts forecasts into actionable decisions across three key domains: inventory management, capacity planning, and network planning. These decisions collectively maximize delivery speed and reliability while minimizing operational costs.

In the last three years, Flipkart has scaled this platform to automate and optimize supply chain operations end-to-end. Its impact has been profound: leading to significantly higher delivery speed and lower supply chain costs. The Flipkart team was recognized for this work as one of the finalists for the prestigious 2025 Franz Edelman award.