In November 2021, Serpro Consulting was invited to conduct a trial study and observation of technology delivery processes and engineering organisation at Unbox Robotics - a Gartner 'Hype Cycle' listed company. With Serpro Consulting's experience in cross-functional engineering disciplines across hardware, software, electronics and embedded control systems; distributed across mathematical, scientific and computing skills, we had a unique advantage in understanding Unbox Robotics' technology vision and their underlying technology delivery organisation and processes. After an initial stage of observational engagement, we are glad to announce that India's leading company in industrial robotics automation has signed on Serpro Consulting to undertake their transformation towards Agile Methods in the next phase of their growth strategy.
Unbox Robotics is headquartered in Bangalore and has its custom fitted engineering and operations facility in Pune. The system is being deployed in various cities in India. It is a first of its kind AI powered robotic parcel sorting system for the logistics and e-commerce industry. The warehouse automation solution is built on a uniquely developed, Swarm Intelligence backed AI software which allows for task allocation, path planning, and co-ordination of multiple robots as a single system. This saves 50% warehouse area with a 5x productivity increase in sorting process operations. The solution is designed and built to be installed 10x faster than the competition - which translates to about 15 days vs 4 months.
The company was established in May 2019 and has rapidly grown in scale after funding of upto 7 million USD led by 3one4 Capital. They are backed by Entrepreneur First, UK (world's largest company builder), SOSV (US) and HAX (world's largest hardware accelerator run by SOSV). Other investors are CIIE, Arali Ventures, Sixth Sense Ventures and WEH Ventures. Among their recognition is the IIGP 2.0 award, won among 2000+ contestant companies. IIGP is an Initiative of the Government of India, Tata Trusts and Lockheed Martin.
UBR is a market leader in its space and is now poised for its next growth phase to cement that leadership. Among others, it has giants in e-commerce and logistics such as Flipkart, Amazon and Delhivery in its customer base. As a result, a part of its strategy was a need to preemptively streamline, reinforce and prepare its technology delivery processes to operate at such a scale.
Serpro Consulting's Agile transformation experience across multiple industry domains and it's hands-on work in engineering disciplines spanning hardware, software, embedded electronics, and controls were key in understanding Unbox's unique business context. Further, the energy, talent and sophistication in Unbox's engineering teams is relentless - and hence demands a customised approach to transformation towards Agile methods. Serpro Consulting considers it a pleasure to be chosen for this. As part of this agreement, the consulting firm will build process practices, training, automation, DevOps, and lead in the overall capability building measures to sharpen the competitive edge for Unbox, and maintain it.
'The SPC way' is one of taking the customer's unique business context and vision into account and then applying the best suitable principles, processes and engineering practices most suitable for the customer's context. This follows application of selective elements from the scaling techniques, to the right extent - so far as it enables the customer to build that competitive edge and establish Kaizen (continuous improvement). In the process letting solutions come from the talent capital from within the customer organisation. This approach also opens pathways for Serpro Consulting to build industry specific, custom transformation solutions tailored to it's client organisations' needs.