Operations Management-1

SWIGGY
Operational Response to the Pandemic Challenges:
Market and Value Chain Perceptive

Presented to
Prof. Sourabh Kulkarni

PRESENTED BY: GROUP 4

Devika Gupta, 291073
Guneet Kaur Pahwa, 291075
Kirti Mittal, 291087
Mudit Bansal, 291088
Naman Jhanjhari, 291091
Gunjash Sampat, 291092
Pranjali Khanna, 291098
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Contents

SWIGGY: India’s fastest UNICORN 2

Company positioning pre-pandemic times 3

Operational and Marketing responses of Swiggy’s value chains 4

Operational Response 4
Marketing Response 8

Operational response in pandemic times- Decoded 9

Transitions 10
Competitive priorities 10
Market positioning 12
New Product/ tactics invented 13
Key Learnings or Takeaways 16

References 17

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1. SWIGGY: India’s fastest UNICORN

Founded in 2014, Swiggy is India’s leading, tech-driven, an on-demand delivery

platform with a vision to elevate the quality of life for the urban consumer by
offering unparalleled convenience. The platform is engineered to connect millions
of consumers with hundreds of thousands of restaurants and stores across 500+
cities.

Propelled by ML technology and fueled by terabytes of data processed every day,

Swiggy offers a hassle-free, fast, and reliable delivery experience for millions of
consumers, across the country. In addition, Swiggy's New Supply is paving the
path for new and innovative ways to solve the emerging demands of consumers.
For every order delivered by Swiggy’s independent fleet of Delivery Partners,
Swiggy uses Machine Learning capabilities across multiple domains (store/item
ranking, meal prep time, travel time predictions, etc.), to ensure a host of
customer-centric features -- like lightning fast delivery, live order tracking -- are
effectively enabled.

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2. Company positioning pre-pandemic times

Swiggy not only made the food delivery an extended arm of restaurants and
made a good profit from this company. Swiggy’s key marketing tool is an app
that helps clients get the food they want, wherever they want.

All the marketing efforts made by my Swiggy have helped to build the
impression that Swiggy makes life simple and comfortable for its customers and
offers the best customer experience and strives to please both the partner
restaurants and the customers with the services.

With the slogan “no customers go hungry” and a click of the button, it lets
customers connect to their favourite restaurants.

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3. Operational and Marketing responses of Swiggy’s value

chains
Operational Response
With the onslaught of COVID-19 pandemic, the way Swiggy continues life and
caters to its consumers, delivery partners and restaurant partners have taken a
drastic shift. The most pressing concern has been to continuously ensure the
safety of these entities in their ecosystem. We have launched several tech-led
initiatives to meet this objective.

Swiggy has initiated steps to maximize safety at each step of its order-delivery
process, hence adding value to each process:

The order delivery process of Swiggy looks like:

Before the Order is Placed by the customer

❖ Ensuring that restaurant staff remain healthy

Restaurant partners check the temperatures of their entire staff every
day. Anyone with a temperature above 99.1 F is advised to rest at home.

❖ Ensuring high levels of hygiene within the restaurant premises

Restaurants conduct a complete scrub-down of every possible touchpoint
— chairs, tables, doorknobs, countertops and sinks — every 4 hours. All
personnel involved in food preparation are provided 3-ply face masks.

Restaurants which adhere to all of these guidelines are promoted as

having ‘Best Safety Standards’ on the app.

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❖ Sensitizing delivery partners about social distancing

Sensitizing the delivery partners is especially important as they
usually come in close physical proximity with different individuals,
including customers, restaurants and other delivery partners.

❖ Deep Learning Algorithm to ensure that delivery partners wear

masks
A Deep-learning-based algorithm was built to ensure that the
delivery partners wear masks on a regular basis. Every delivery
partner is required to click a selfie and post it on their app when
they log-in to the system and start receiving orders. The algorithm
checks if the delivery partner is wearing a mask and does not allow
partners without masks to log-in.

When a delivery partner is assigned to an order

❖ Just in Time delivery partner Arrival

Just in Time (JIT) ensures that the delivery partner assigned to a
particular order arrives at the restaurant right when the food is about to
be ready. This reduces the wait-time and hence the long queues at
restaurants.

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❖ Food-Ready — delivery partner Assignment

As soon as the food is ready for a particular order, it is assigned to a
delivery partner who is already present at the restaurant. Assignment
thus happens in a FIFO manner. This ensures that the wait time of the
delivery partner for his order is significantly reduced.

Food-Ready Assignment also leads to lesser instances of a large number

of delivery partners waiting at the restaurant as compared to the standard
assignment.

When the order is picked-up

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❖ Standard Demarcation Queues

Delivery partners were asked to stand in designated spots or
markers while in a queue to pick up the food. Accurate guidelines
on how to create these markers were shared with the restaurants.

❖ Designated Packers at Stores

To reduce wait-time at grocery stores, some Swiggy agents are
stationed in stores as packers. These agents start putting the
contents of the order together and then send a notification when
the order is packed and ready to be shipped. A delivery partner is
assigned to the order only after this signal comes through. This
drastically cuts down the time the partner has to spend at the
store.

When the order is delivered to the customer — Contactless

Deliveries
Contactless Deliveries were geared towards maximizing the distance
between the delivery partner and the customer. The delivery partner
delivers food outside the customer’s doorstep and then leaves. The
customer gets a notification on the app saying that their food has been
delivered. Fewer the number of customers a delivery partner interacted
with, smaller the chance of him contracting an infection, and smaller still
the chance of him transmitting it to any other customer or restaurant
executive. To ensure that orders are delivered accurately, the delivery
partner submits a picture of the delivery every time he delivers a
contactless order.

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Marketing Response
The operational initiatives by Swiggy to assure safety to its customers are
regularly marketed to reiterate that order food from Swiggy is safe.

Swiggy, apart from talking about safety, has also launched multiple
discounts and offers. It has also rolled out a campaign highlighting the
plight of staff at various restaurants that have been hit by lockdowns.

In June, Swiggy in collaboration with the National Restaurant Association

of India (NRAI) launched a campaign #AtYourService, urging customers to
support their favourite restaurants by ordering or dining in.

Swiggy was also a part of a food security initiative for restaurant staff in
association with Pepsi and NRAI. Pepsi said it will donate a part of the
proceeds of the maximum retail price of every soft drink ordered from a
restaurant listed on Swiggy to NRAI’s employee relief corpus.

Advertising experts said consumer confidence-building initiatives will help

revive demand and build brand loyalty at a time when the industry is
reeling from covid.

Some of the latest advertisements of Swiggy include:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBmElWEum44
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueJD6xgu2y8

All these advertisements aimed at re-instilling TRUST in the customers,

and reiterating that ordering food from Swiggy is SAFE.

They partnered with Chef Ranveer Brar to educate its customers of the
best practices to stay safe while ordering online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YDpe9F6V64&feature=emb_logo

During IPL 2020, Swiggy launched special offers on food delivery, which
were highly advertised on TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPrN8kNUcPo&feature=emb_logo

3.

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4. Operational response in pandemic times- Decoded

Swiggy during the pandemic shifted from delivering food to groceries and
everyday essentials. This operational shift came to support the company and its
employees.
Once the unlock was announced, Swiggy through all its initiatives and
advertisements, aimed at delivering the message to its customers that it is safe
to order from Swiggy, be it food or groceries. It has marketed its safety
precautions heavily to instil trust among the customers. It launched various
discounts during the festive season and the IPL season with the tagline “trust by
1 crore plus Indians” to reiterate and reinstil the trust its customers had in
Swiggy prior to the pandemic, and increase food delivery volumes.

The prime focus of the company has broadened from just-food delivery to Safe
food delivery. With these efforts, Swiggy reported food delivery volumes back to
85% of the pre-covid times.

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5. Transitions

a) Competitive priorities

From having competitive priorities of Delivery and Flexibility, Swiggy, a food

delivery app, has transitioned to consider Safety as the uppermost priority. In
the present scenario, the online delivery of food and groceries has been
recognised by the central government as an essential service, and one that helps
keep several citizens safe indoors. Additionally, credible bodies like the Food and
Safety Standards Authority of India and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention have clarified that food hasn’t been found to be a medium of
transmission of COVID-19. However, in order to minimize the low risk of
transmission through the delivery experience even further, here are a few
implemented measures by Swiggy:

i) Delivery Partner Training

To ensure that our order is delivered safely, they regularly send reminders to
their delivery partners on best practices of respiratory hygiene, proper method
and frequency of handwashing, as well as identification of associated symptoms.
A series of videos capturing pertinent details shot in multiple languages is being
circulated as a ready reckoner.

ii) Masks for Delivery Partners

They have been working hard to get masks to all our delivery partners through
our network of cloud kitchens and partners. They have additionally also created
a technology-based solution to check the usage of masks by delivery partners
before they start delivering every day.

iii) No-Contact Delivery

To make deliveries safer for us and for their delivery partners, they had
introduced a No-contact Delivery feature on their app in March 2020. By opting
in for a no-contact delivery, we can maintain social distancing between us and
our delivery partner. In this case, our order will be dropped off at our gate or
door, which we can then pick up at our convenience.

iv) Restaurant Partner Advisory

To facilitate the safe and hygienic preparation of every order, they have shared a
detailed advisory with all of their restaurant partners on best practices to be
followed. These include hand washing regimes, mandatory temperature checks,
use of 3-ply face masks for all staff, self-quarantine measures in case of any

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illness, and sanitization facilities for delivery partners at the order pick-up points.
In an effort to keep our order protected from any contact during transit, they are
also urging partners to pack all orders in separate bags.

v) Auditing Restaurants with Best Safety Standards

They are working closely with restaurants which they have identified to be taking
additional precautionary measures including daily staff testing, maintaining high
hygiene standards and safe packaging. We can look for the Best In Safety badge
or collection to order from these restaurants. For many of these restaurants, we
can also get a peek into their kitchen to see some of their safety processes
through photos in the Safety Standards section in their menu on Swiggy.

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b) Market positioning

From a marketing point of view, initiatives Swiggy undertook and the campaigns
it ran were focused on doing their bit for the consumers, restaurant and delivery
partner ecosystem, rather than traditional brand campaigns. All throughout the
crisis, the communication was crafted keeping the consumer sentiment in mind.
The early unlock focused on the hygiene and safety precautions, later moving to
convey to the consumers how ordering-in is safe and what precautions could be
followed.

For example, in an effort to support the severely impacted restaurant industry,

Swiggy launched the ‘At Your Service’ campaign. Promoted mainly through its
social channels, the objective was to instil trust amongst the consumers and
encourage them to support their local restaurants by ordering-in or to help the
restaurant community recover.

Swiggy is India’s largest online food delivery platform, offering restaurants the
chance to do home delivery – with many immediately seizing the opportunity at
the start of the pandemic when their physical locations were shut. And this year
they introduced Swiggy Access, offering the option for restaurants to create
cloud kitchens, allowing restaurants to open up in new cities – but without the
prohibitive costs of hiring, staffing and maintaining an entire restaurant. One
example was Marriott hotels, with whom Swiggy teamed up to help take their
Marriott on Wheels concept to more cities. ” Cameras were even installed in their
kitchens at the start of the unlock to ensure safety rules were followed.

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c) New Product/ tactics invented

The initial phase of the pandemic months saw a dip in the number of restaurants
that were operational and also the number of orders being placed. To combat
the fear factor and also reinstate the consumer confidence, key safety practices
like no-contact delivery increased delivery partner hygiene, and best safety
standards tags for restaurants were introduced while also communicating these
measures and the right food handling practices to the consumers. Over time,
through the WHO and other sources, consumer awareness around food ordering
has spread, resulting in a resurgence of demand. More recently, the cricketing
and festive season added to the surge in orders.

Pivoting the business model beyond 'food delivery'

The ‘new’ normal made brands across categories look beyond their existing core
offerings and look at the new hotspots of demand. A nimble-footed Swiggy also
launched new offerings such as Swiggy Instamart and HealthHub, as well as
rapidly expanded services like Swiggy Genie.
Swiggy Genie is a new offering that was launched to let consumers pick up
anything from groceries to laundry to sending across home-cooked food or
supplies to friends and family.
The hyperlocal delivery offering has unlocked a new dimension of convenience in
the times of social distancing for consumers as well as earnings for the delivery
partners.

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Other newer subcategories identified to fill need gaps include Swiggy HealthHub,
where Swiggy collaborated with leading restaurants to assist them in creating
delectable healthy options of popular dishes.

Introducing Female Delivery Executives

Swiggy’s narrative carries a simple message: They want to normalize and
celebrate women venturing into the male-dominated delivery industry. They
want to inspire them to take the leap and become the ‘Santa’ for their loved
ones; because they firmly believe that just because a woman is a hunger saviour
at home doesn’t mean she can’t be a hunger saviour on the road. So gave
charge for food delivery to its female executives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FilPXh_MXRU&feature=emb_logo

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‘Hope, Not Hunger’

With the slogan “no customers go hungry” and a click of the button, Swiggy lets
customers connect to their favourite restaurants.
Staying true to their slogan, during Pandemic, Swiggy came up with a Campaign
“Hope Not Hunger: A Movement To Ensure No One Went To Bed Hungry” that
was launched on March 30th, 2020 with the aim of distributing wholesome,
hygienic meals to those in need. To make this happen, Swiggy partnered with
more than 75 NGOs and several state governments across affected cities in
India. Partner kitchens prepared and packed meals comprising daal, rice, and
vegetables, which were distributed daily.
Seven weeks and thousands of generous contributions later, Swiggy was able to:
● Raise Rs. 9,50,14,827
● distribute 30 lakh meals in 30 cities
● partner with 75+ NGO
● contribute to 35,512 individual

Pani Puri Bhaiya, Vada Pav Didi, And More Join Swiggy!
Tougher still, is helplessly watching our beloved pani puri wallas, vada pav
bhaiyas, and bhel puri didis shut their shops overnight. Our hearts went out to
these vendors; we wanted to help them revive their businesses. That’s when we
struck a partnership with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ (MoHUA) PM
SVANidhi scheme.
The PM SVANidhi scheme, in collaboration with Swiggy, aims to provide working
capital loans to street food vendors, while also boosting their business through
online ordering. Currently, we’re scouring India’s top street food destinations,
continuously identifying iconic vendors, holding their hands through food safety
practices, while introducing them to the world of online ordering. At the time of
onboarding, all vendors will be registered with FSSAI. Swiggy will then facilitate
a Food Safety Training and Certification (FOSTAC) in partnership with FSSAI and
their empanelled partners.

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d) Key Learnings or Takeaways

● Swiggy’s hard work at integrating communication. The way Swiggy

made an impression of extended arms of restaurants among the
people but also made the impression that Swiggy makes life simple
and comfortable, gained their confidence and revived demand amid
the COVID-19 pandemic.

● Swiggy’s drastic shift and the way they catered its consumers,
delivery partner and restaurant owners in this pandemic.

● Their initiative steps to maximize the safety at each step of its

order-delivery process, hence adding value to each process.

● Introducing Contactless Deliveries towards maximizing the distance

between the delivery partner and the customer.

● Their operational shift during this pandemic time from delivering

food to groceries and everyday essentials which ended up
supporting the company and its employees.

● In this ‘new’ normal the way SWIGGY looked beyond their existing
core offerings and looked at the new hotspots of demand. Swiggy
launched new offerings such as Swiggy Instamart and HealthHub,
as well as rapidly expanded services like Swiggy Genie.

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References

● https://bstrategyhub.com/swiggy-business-model-how-does-swiggy-
make-money/
● https://blog.swiggy.com/category/life-at-swiggy/swiggyforgood/
● https://www.thedrum.com/news/2020/12/03/how-indian-delivery-app-
swiggy-combated-the-lockdown-blues
● https://bytes.swiggy.com/facing-up-to-a-pandemic-a-look-at-swiggys-
efforts-to-counter-the-covid-19-threat-7b9ec0bd7e5f
● https://www.marketing91.com/marketing-strategy-of-swiggy/

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