Meaningful innovation

Hackathons are proving grounds to harvest new ideas, stimulate creativity and trigger the problem-solving skills of individuals. For a growing organisation like ours, ideas are our lifeblood. We nurture, develop and share them with a world that expects us to inspire. But the best ideas often don’t emerge from a single person – they’re the result of collaboration. Driving ‘collaborative innovation’ hackathons are our way of encouraging internal team-building fostering a culture of innovation.

Every quarter, a number of our engineers unleash their talent in all night coding sessions which end in meaningful and disruptive innovation unique to our business. These events are a fun way to push boundaries and make people think laterally.  We recently concluded our third successful Hackathon, with hacks for warehouse automation, mobile app innovation, website changes etc.

Scheduled for April 1st from 10:00am to April 2nd, 10:00 am, we had eight teams with three to five people per team. There was only one rule: you have to work on something outside your day job.

In the past, we’ve had some cutting-edge technology innovation from these hackathons, that have helped us strengthen our foothold as a digital brand. As we grow, as both as an organisation and as a business, the impact of hackathons remains massive. Hackathons make us believe that thinking differently pays off. Bonds and ideas are built; will we expand the hackathon beyond the office? Maybe, Maybe not!

We believe there is little point in developing products that may be clever but which aren’t meaningful to our customers. We believe in events alike which are exciting ways to get teams to collaborate and innovate beyond tomorrow, infusing the most crucial ingredient of all. Meaning.

As a business everyone has challenges and solving these challenges with meaningful innovation keeping the customer at the centre has been our USP. Leveraging technology to enhance the customers experience has been of prime importance for us as a digital brand.

There were also some break-through hacks that will translate to providing customers with an unmatched online shopping experience through our digital interface. Some of the interesting hacks were:

• Our automated inventory updates give us a comprehensive report on the status of our inventory. But to predict inventory, in one of our hacks, teams can estimate the exact time the product will take to move from the source facility to destination, thereby improving our delivery cycle.
• In another interesting hack, a team managed to sync the inventory data between the fulfilment centre and the warehouse. This with the help of an ERP solution will influence customer satisfaction ensuring customers are accurately updated on the availability of products.
• In order to optimise purchase orders in containers, there was a remarkable idea that will enable our delivery team increase efficiency by automating a time consuming process.

That’s all we can tell you for now! Sounds exciting? We can’t wait either!

Judging the hackathon was as exciting as being a part of it. Judges were fascinated with the innovative and imaginative engineering capabilities of our teams. 

Here’s what Anandamoy Roychowdhary – Director Technology, Sequoia Capital had to say while judging some extraordinary ideas.