We’ve almost doubled the speed our GrabMart pickers get groceries at Jaya Grocer stores

Gaurav Gupta, senior product manager

. August 3, 2023 . Malaysia

When you’re at a supermarket, you’re typically going back and forth between aisles hunting down what you need.

But when you’re a professional picker, this lost efficiency translates to fewer jobs completed per hour and more time on your feet.

For Jaya Grocer in Malaysia, GrabMart team developed a new version of the app that guides our pickers through the supermarket outlets’ aisles.

The aim was to shorten the time needed for searching and picking, helping the team fulfill more orders in a shorter time, and saving the cost of additional man hours in each outlet.

The ultimate goal is to go through the aisles just once.

While one way to get more efficient is by grouping items by category, say fresh fruit first before going to dry goods, the ultimate goal is for the picker to go through the aisles just once.

Reaching this optimum is key now that Jaya Grocer is part of Grab and is seeing a bigger volume of orders.

(We acquired the Malaysian supermarket chain in 2022. You can read more about how we integrated Jaya Grocer into GrabMart here.)

One route to rule them all

As we integrated Jaya Grocer’s over 40 outlets into Grab, pickers used the existing GrabMart picker app to navigate the stores. This organised groceries into the standard GrabMart categories, but the team wanted a more customised map for each Jaya Grocer store that would sequence the order of items to pick so they would only go through each store once.

Our new system starts with getting each Jaya Grocer store’s master list into our system. This comprehensive list also has each item marked by a unique location code in the store, telling the picker which aisle, bay, and shelf it’s in.

We set an initial target to raise our 70 picking jobs per hour to 95 jobs done; our first pilot test surpassed this with 132 jobs done per hour.

Next, our backend system draws a location sequence path through the store, and this is displayed to the picker as a guided path.

We set an initial target to raise our 70 picking jobs per hour to 95 jobs done; our first pilot test surpassed this with 132 jobs done per hour.

Going live

Our new picker map is already live in three Jaya Grocer stores, and will cover both dark stores and retail supermarket outlets in Malaysia.

Outside of Malaysia, the picker app is being piloted in one of GrabMart’s busiest dark stores in Indonesia too, as we prepare to cover more GrabMart facilities across Southeast Asia.

Future upgrades to the system will let pickers gather multiple orders in a single run. We’re also building more flexibility in fulfilling orders partially, to allow for situations such as not having a big enough cart for bulky items.

With the e-grocery boom predicted to continue, these backend improvements allow our operations to scale up while helping our staff be more efficient.

Engineering Partners

We’ve almost doubled the speed our GrabMart pickers get groceries at Jaya Grocer stores

One route to rule them all

Going live

Komsan Chiyadis

Komsan Chiyadis