You just don’t play for your passion, you play for respect and pride..!!
Being good at sports is important as it develops strong social attributes and better social skills. Decathlon Group is one such brand which serves this very purpose on a daily basis i.e. “to make the pleasure and benefits of sport accessible to all”. There have been very few brands which have globally raised the bar of sports and fitness industry, unlike Decathlon.It makes sports accessible to many by bringing 70 sports under one roof.
The students of ISBR Business School, PGDM batch 2017-2019 got a splendid opportunity of visiting Decathlon Logistics Warehouse on 5th August 2017.
As none of us has ever been to a warehouse of such a great brand before, the first impression we had after entering the warehouse was that it was huge. We were greeted there by Mr. Piyush, who looks after recruitment of Bangalore and Delhi branches. We were taken to the meeting room for a brief introduction about Decathlon. He told us in detail about how the first store of Decathlon started in Lille, France in 1976 and later on expanded to different countries such as China (in 2003) and India (in 2009). There are 48 stores in India currently out of which 13 stores are situated in the north region of the country. He also told us that Bangalore handles the production and manufacturing for South, West and East regions of India.The highest sales which is around 60 to 70% comes from Bangalore.
Later we were divided into groups of 10 members each and each group was assigned to a trainee of Decathlon. They took us around the warehouse and showed us the working procedure and working environment.They gave us an overall idea about how Decathlon has come up with a unique idea of cost optimization and that is why they don’t install AC’s or make their store look fancy. All the stores of Decathlon are very simple, but they make sure that the products they sell are of high quality.
The entire warehouse is extended in an area of 210000 sqft. and is divided into three zones of 60,000 sqft. .The major decathlon warehouse is named as CAC and under it, there are two more categories which are named as CAR and it is from CAR that all the sports products are transported from the warehouse to the stores.
Decathlon Group comprises of different brands of sports like ARTENGO for badminton and tennis, KIPSTA for football, DOMYAS for gym wear, NABAJI for swimming, OXELO for skating and much more. KESHARA is the biggest brand of Decathlon Group. We were also shown and briefed about RFID, which is a barcode scanner, used to facilitate tracking of individual boxes in the warehouse. These boxes have been assigned a unique RFID codes.
They also have “Click and Collect” option where a customer can select the products online and later pick it up from the stores. Each zone will have different vendors, who’ll arrange trucks for the dispatch and to optimize the transport charges they transport the products which fall under same location category so that they don’t have to transport the goods again in the same location, they call this process as “MILK RUN”. Decathlon has tie-ups with snapdeal and few more online websites to facilitate the sale of their products and to deliver it to their customers in the comfort of their home.
From this visit to the warehouse of Decathlon we learned and understood how such a huge system can be managed so efficiently with so little use of technology as at Decathlon, the use of modern technology is very minimal. They also showed us how the products they receive back due to customer complaints are simply destroyed rather than repairing it and selling it again which is a very genuine and impressive practice carried on by them. We also learned that how necessary it is to trust our co-workers, peers and customers as there are no cameras installed in the warehouse or the stores as they believe that their employees or customers are very trustworthy and they do not need to get into such practices.The working environment at Decathlon taught us that it is essential to believe in team work rather than simply relying on technology in order to accomplish our goals.
– Contributed by
Deepika Singh ( PGDM- 2017-19)
(Member of ISBR Writers & Media Club)