Building India’s intralogistics backbone: How Godrej Enterprises is engineering global capacity through advanced storage solutions.

From engineered racking to automated rack clad warehouses, Godrej Enterprises Group is helping modernise India’s intralogistics backbone and exporting that capability worldwide. In this conversation, Business Head Vikas Choudaha discusses scale, exports, breakthrough projects, and how intelligent warehousing is shaping a faster, greener, and more resilient economy.

Q1. How would you describe the scale and scope of Storage Solutions business of Godrej today? Which sectors do you serve?

We operate at a scale that spans design, manufacturing, and turnkey execution of storage and intralogistics infrastructure, ranging from selective and high-density racking to automated racking systems (ARS), rack clad facilities. As a part of Godrej Enterprises Group, our mandate is simple: create storage solutions that enhance throughput, safety, and operational efficiency across India’s supply chains.

Today, our business processes over 1 lakh tonnes of steel annually within our manufacturing facility of over 2.5 lakh sq ft. With multi-year plans underway, we’re continuously investing in design, infrastructure, and digital technologies to meet growing demand across India and global markets. We have expanded capacity meaningfully through the acquisition of Armes Maini (An European Joint Venture), which provides an incremental 20% manufacturing headroom, scalable further as demand grows.

Our commitment to engineering modular, technology-enabled systems, empowers industries across verticals from ecommerce & quick commerce, retail and automotive to food & beverages, pharma, and logistics with tailored, future-ready storage solutions.

Q2. India is pushing to become a global manufacturing hub. Where does intelligent storage infrastructure fit and is industry ready to invest?

Globally competitive manufacturing economies treat storage and material flow as a core engineering discipline, not an afterthought. India is at that inflection point. Land costs are rising in industrial corridors, labour availability and reliability vary by region, and global buyers are demanding audit ready, high integrity supply chains. The business case for intelligent storage, higher density, automated handling, traceability, and safer operations, is self-evident.

What we’re seeing on the ground is a shift from “Does automation make sense?” to “Which solution best fits my growth model and compliance needs?” Our role is to combine engineering depth with deploy ability at scale, and create solutions that work for varied applications across spectrum of industries.

Q3. Your team recently delivered one of India’s most advanced automated rack‑clad warehouses. What makes it a breakthrough?

We delivered an Automated Racking System (ARS) rack‑clad warehouse of 120 feet (36 metres) height for a renowned pharmaceutical company. In a rack‑clad concept, the racking itself is the primary load‑bearing structure, with roof and wall cladding applied directly to it. This creates a single integrated system, structurally efficient, faster to build, and optimised for automation from the ground up.

What’s remarkable is the density: within a footprint of about 11,490 sq ft, the facility accommodates 6,316 pallet positions with minimal manual intervention in storage and retrieval. For regulated environments like pharma, this combination of automation, and traceability facilitates higher throughput, lower error rates, and better warehouse efficiencies than conventional structure of equivalent capacity.

Q4. What is the engineering and manufacturing backbone that enables projects of this complexity?

It starts with worldclass manufacturing. Our Chennai and Bengaluru facilities give us scale, geographic reach, and the ability to serve both domestic and export markets with speed. In Chennai, we run high throughput roll forming lines and a first of its kind end-to-end automated panel line, from sheet metal to a dispatch ready product with an automated on-line packing. We’ve deployed multi-robot welding cells that can deliver up to 2,000 beams per day, doubling productivity for specific assemblies. Our Industrial IoT systems, developed inhouse, monitor power consumption, pressure, uptime, and idle time on critical equipment, driving higher productivity and predictive maintenance.

On the engineering side, our design configuration platform Aarohan, allows both designers and sales teams to configure any layout by a simple drag and drop, and further customise to suit specific customer needs and then one click to export into PDF/CAD drawings and bill of materials, compressing quotation and engineering cycles dramatically. In the field, our Rack Audit App uses AI based image assessment to classify damage severity and autogenerates customer ready reports, enabling faster interventions and safer warehouses.

We’ve digitised workflows across the value chain for MIS, and are scaling Robotic Process Automation for order booking, freight bill matching, and PLM item code creation. This is how we connect design, manufacturing, project execution and cash flow into one integrated execution engine.

Q5. Storage needs vary widely across industries. How do you tailor systems for pharma, FMCG/ecommerce, automotive, and manufacturing?

Every sector has a different requirement. In pharma, temperature control and traceability is critical, above all compliance is paramount for anytime audit readiness. In FMCG and ecommerce, the challenge is velocity and SKU diversity, with same day fulfilment within minutes with near zero error rates. In automotive, it’s about just in time reliability, managing thousands of components against production schedules where a single delay can halt an entire line. Across sectors, our solutions are designed for client specific workflow, throughput, pick accuracy and manpower safety, with automation that is modular and upgradable ensuring the storage system acts as a precision instrument integrated with the client’s MES/WMS/ERP stack.

Q6. Exports and global reach are a recurring theme. How is the “India to the world” story unfolding for you?

First, there’s our heritage of over 70 years in engineered storage and presence in 40+ countries. Second, the manufacturing scale‑up we’ve undertaken, especially with Chennai and the Bengaluru addition, has been designed to support both domestic and export order books with precision engineering and faster lead times.

Today, over 20% of our revenue is generated from international markets, and our goal is to double this share within the next 2–3 years. Australia & US are key focus markets, alongside the MENA region, and Southeast Asia. We leverage high quality Indian steel to produce durable, high-performance systems tailored to local codes and operating conditions. Equally important, we partner with leading automation and intralogistics firms to deliver integrated solutions for modern, automated warehouses. All our products are manufactured using RoHS compliant materials, underscoring our commitment to health, safety, and environmental standards.

Q7. India’s quick commerce and ecommerce sectors are reshaping warehousing. What are you seeing, and how are you responding?

The demand curve is unmistakable. With millions of square feet of mother hubs and thousands of dark stores projected by platforms and retailers, the need for agile, high efficiency storage is accelerating. Our own outlook reflects this: quick commerce alone is expected to be a major growth driver over the next 12–18 months, and we’re aligned to capture that with tech integrated solutions and capacity anchored in Chennai and Bengaluru to serve the market.

More broadly, we anticipate the intralogistics market to expand steadily, and we’re continuing to invest in production, locations, new products, and digital to keep pace. Our job is to deliver scalable future ready storage solutions that works across India’s varied footprint, from large format fulfilment centres to compact urban nodes.

Q8. What role does intelligent warehousing play in sustainability, and how is Godrej embedding it?

Higher storage density on a smaller footprint reduces land use, building envelope, and energy per pallet. Automation reduces error, damage, and rework, which are often invisible sustainability costs. At our Chennai facility, we’ve embedded fuel shift (furnace oil to PNG) for ~30% carbon reduction, are 2× water positive, and are on a Zero Waste to Landfill journey, backed by a broader commitment to EP100 energy productivity. The goal is simple: make efficiency and sustainability two sides of the same engineering decision.

Q9. Finally, what is your vision for the Storage Solutions business as an ‘industry of industries’, and as a nation builder?

India’s logistics transformation is structural: GST normalisation, formalisation of retail, PLI led manufacturing, and rising export ambition are all converging. The next wave will come from tier2 industrial corridors and export-oriented clusters that demand scalable, automated storage to compete globally.

Our vision is to create the silent infrastructure that facilitates every other sector move faster, safer, and smarter. That means:

• Engineering excellence at global benchmarks, made in India.

• Technology and automation built into the DNA of every solution.

• Manufacturing at scale to deliver speed, quality, and cost advantages at once.

• Exports from India that carry our standards to the world.

If a pharmaceutical dose reaches a patient safely, if an online order arrives the same day, if an automotive line never misses a beat, there is a good chance an Indian made Godrej storage system is working quietly in the background. That, to me, is nation building by design.

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Attribution: As told to The Hindu by Vikas Choudaha, Business Head – Storage Solutions, Godrej Enterprises Group.

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