Transportation is a thankless business.
You move goods from A to B. Something goes wrong. Someone gets blamed. And at the end of the month, half the team is chasing PODs while the other half argues with logistics partners about why deliveries were late.
Here is the question nobody actually asks: what does your data say? Not what you think is happening on the ground. What the data says.
We ran 7,219 shipments for a leading global footwear brand through LogiCloud. Two months. India-wide. What we found will be familiar to every supply chain head in this country.
THE NUMBER
On-time delivery rate: 40.5%.
The benchmark for B2B retail logistics is 75–80%. This brand was at 40.5% — six out of every ten deliveries arriving late. To stores. To distributors. To ecom partners.
By channel it got sharper. Ecom-B2B: 14.3% on time. Distributor: 14.3%. One in seven. These channels have hard commitments — purchase orders, replenishment calendars. A missed EDD (Expected Delivery Date) is not a shipment problem. It is a stock-out. It is a revenue problem.
THE PARTNER NOBODY WAS WATCHING
Now the uncomfortable part. The brand's largest logistics partner — carrying 32.5% of all volume — was delivering on time 28.8% of the time. Less than 3 in 10. The second-largest: 32.2%.
Meanwhile Bluedart, at 30% of volume, was running 65.3% on time. Best performer by a distance.
So the problem was not that logistics is hard. The volume was concentrated with the wrong partners. The data had shown this all along. Nobody had read it.
THE ₹54 CRORE HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Then, POD. 57% of dockets had a proof of delivery on file. Of those, only 13.6% had been audited and approved. 86% of received PODs — stuck in pending.
And two partners, across 289 dockets, had zero POD. Not low. Zero. Value at risk: ₹54 crore. No proof of delivery means no invoice. No invoice means no payment. Your receivables sitting on a ticking clock the billing team didn't know had started.
YOU ALREADY KNOW IT WILL BE LATE
Here is the part I find most interesting. LogiCloud has a model that predicts, at the time of booking — before the truck leaves the warehouse — whether a shipment will be ONTIME or DELAY. Every one of the 4,376 delivered shipments carried that tag. The model was flagging delays before they happened.
Seems counter-intuitive, doesn't it? You already know it will be late — so fix it now. Call the partner. Reroute. Prioritise. Pre-empt the problem before the customer calls asking where their order is.
AT WEBXPRESS
We have understood something for a long time. The problem in Indian logistics is not technology. It is not even execution. It is that nobody is reading the signal.
The data is there — in every TMS, every docket register, every partner portal. But it sits in a spreadsheet that is three days old, read by someone also managing 14 other things. By the time anyone acts, the month is gone. LogiCloud does not tell you how great the software is. It tells you — specifically — which partner is failing, which zone is stressed, which ₹54 crore is sitting without a POD. Today. Not next week.
I will not claim we fixed this brand's operation in a fortnight — that work is theirs to do, partner by partner. What I will claim is that they can no longer say they didn't know.
If you run logistics in India — 50 trucks or 5,000 — you have a version of this story in your own data. The only question is whether you are reading it.
Boring is good for business.