Director of Network Design — Interim, Express Logistics

The mandate

The network model understated sort dwell and urban delivery volatility, producing missed connections and emergency charters during peak. Its director was reassigned after actual flows diverged sharply from investment assumptions.

The interim must begin within three weeks for a fixed nine-month design-and-proof window. The role dissolves after the next peak, when the internal industrial-engineering head inherits the model and annual planning cycle.

Completion requires a board-approved five-year node plan, twelve per cent lower cost per shipment at constant service, peak throughput proven at 1.6 times normal volume, and the successor independently reproducing the final scenario outputs.

The director may set modelling standards, choose pilot lanes and approve temporary trials below ₹50 lakh. Hub leases, permanent automation capital above ₹2 crore and service-promise changes require executive approval; the role cannot alter customer tariffs.

Last-mile labour policy, international air contracts and warehouse customer solutions are excluded. Network design must provide evidence to those owners without becoming accountable for every downstream commercial choice.

Why this seat is open

Peak failure invalidated the model used to justify the current hub footprint. The board needs an independent rebuild before approving further automation or leases. A time-limited director will prove the design in live operations and then return the capability to internal engineering.

What you will own

• Recalibrate flow, dwell, missort, vehicle and delivery assumptions using scan-level operational data.
• Decide the future role of each major hub by catchment, cut-off, capacity, resilience and total shipment cost.
• Produce service-cost frontiers showing the operational and capital consequence of each promise tier.
• Pilot revised linehaul connections and sort waves on representative high-volatility corridors.
• Stress-test capacity for weather, festival, seller concentration and simultaneous node outage scenarios.
• Author the five-year node plan with capital gates, lease decisions and implementation dependencies.
• Train the internal head to reproduce scenarios, challenge assumptions and own the next annual refresh.

Candidate qualifications

• Eighteen-plus years in parcel, postal, e-commerce or express network design and industrial engineering.
• Built a national node-and-linehaul model that was implemented and validated through a peak cycle.
• Advanced knowledge of parcel flow, sort capacity, cut-off design, route economics and service-cost trade-offs.
• Experience reconciling model assumptions to scanner, vehicle and workforce evidence from live operations.
• Ability to explain optimisation choices to operators and boards without hiding behind algorithmic output.
• Proven transfer of a planning model and its governance to an internal analytics or engineering team.

Non-negotiables

• Can work in Delhi NCR within three weeks and visit hubs during night sort operations.
• Independent of automation vendors and real-estate counterparties under consideration.
• Will accept a fixed endpoint after peak validation and internal handover.
• Comfortable exposing prior investment assumptions that do not survive operational evidence.

1. 49 words maximum. State availability and whether you can observe night-sort operations across major hubs.
2. 49 words maximum. What network cost reduction did your implemented model sustain at constant service?
3. 49 words maximum. Which peak assumption proved wrong in practice, and how did you recalibrate it?