Kirana in the time of lockdown - a community ordering system for neighbourhood brick & mortar stores

Earlier last week, I signed up to volunteer for our community RWA's Covid-19 assistance efforts. The community where I reside is one of the largest in Hyderabad, India with 14 towers, each having 14 floors and anywhere between 8-10 apartments on each floor. 

A rough back of the envelope calculation shows - 
* Around 1500 - 2000 apartments 
* 4500 - 7000 residents

We have one grocery store, one store for vegetables and one medical store. All are brick and mortar set-ups with counter based point of sale systems. No Apps. 

Expectedly, all three stores started seeing a massive surge in footfall as soon as the national lockdown was announced earlier this week. None of them were equipped to manage the surge of customers, who were anxious to stock up on essential items. 

A crowd of people during a lockdown, especially one with the mantra of social distancing, is a terribly bad outcome. The uncertainty around the movement of essential items was leading many residents to hoard - a classic re-enactment of the various bank runs we've seen since November 2017. This, in turn, was leading supplies to exhaust before they could get to others waiting in the line for their turns. 

Clearly, the first order of The Resident Volunteer Group's (RVG) business was to streamline all this chaos. Some folks, who are much kinder than me, volunteered to physically be present at these stores to help with taking and packing orders, helping with the billing, coordinating with various block (tower) volunteers for collection, and even personally delivering items to seniors and residents with medical conditions. So much respect for these wonderful people!

I decided to build a system that can try to automate this entire process efficiently. I haven't written a software program in years, but I thought I was fairly okay with using Google Sheets, so I might just give it a try. 

It was important to remember that this automation simplifies the existing system which was about to break down because of uncertainty of availability of items, and because of people physically flocking to these stores by breaking quarantine advise. So, I wanted to build something that assured residents that supplies are available while ensuring that they don't leave their homes in unnecessary panic. 

So I set up an online form that would segregate supplies as essentials vs non-essentials. The grocery store manager agreed to send me the list of essential items with their availability for the next 2 days in a spreadsheet. The RVG also decided to put a quantity cap on each essential item so that we could have less bottlenecks in getting essentials to as many households as possible. We put everything from the vegetable and medical stores on the essential list as well. 

 

I set up the following work-flow to get this system going -


The responses from each order form were added to a Google Sheet that was shared with the RVG and the store Admin.




I also made a simple app using Appsheet for residents and RVG members on the ground to track the status of each order that is placed through this system.



The app has a simple toggle to change the status of any order to 'Paid', so the store admin can update picked up orders on the go as they hand them over to the residents.

The system is not perfect and there are still some teething issues that I'm trying to resolve so that it aligns seamlessly with the situation at the store, but so far it has been able to assist in delivering over 2000 orders over the last 3 days.

Such a system can be implemented, in its core form, within a day at any gated communities throughout the country which are facing a similar challenges during the lockdown. I'm happy to help implement it remotely if your community or anyone that you know can benefit from it. Please write to me at hi@ilipsis.io. 

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