Chief Operating Officer — Interim, Integrated Logistics

The mandate

A control-tower implementation sent conflicting dispatch instructions across road, rail and warehouse teams, causing service penalties on three national contracts. The COO resigned after the board learned that margin reports excluded spot-transport and rehandling costs.

The interim must start within two weeks and hold the seat for twelve months while the permanent operating model is defined. Search begins once the first two contracts return to contribution, with eight weeks planned for executive overlap.

Handover requires on-time-in-full above ninety-six per cent, all five major contracts at or above reset contribution margin for a quarter, spot-buy freight below six per cent, and the successor independently chairing the national network review.

The COO may reroute capacity, suspend non-performing carriers, approve spot purchases below ₹75 lakh and alter depot shifts. Depot closure, customer concessions above ₹1 crore and contracts over ₹10 crore require committee approval; commercial pricing and fleet acquisitions are withheld.

Warehouse automation projects, international freight forwarding and an unrelated e-commerce acquisition sit outside scope. The interim must repair domestic contract execution rather than widen the transformation perimeter.

Why this seat is open

The rollout exposed both a broken operating signal and hidden contract economics. Leadership departure left regional chiefs optimising their own nodes while customers experienced the end-to-end failure. Temporary executive authority is needed until the network and its permanent leadership can operate from one verified fact base.

What you will own

• Reconstruct route, handling, spot-buy and penalty costs into a true contribution statement for each major contract.
• Decide the operating source of truth for order promise, capacity, dispatch, exception and proof of delivery.
• Rebalance linehaul, depot and warehouse capacity against daily demand and explicit customer priority rules.
• Suspend or recover carriers using safety, service, claims and cost evidence rather than rate alone.
• Establish contract control rooms that close root causes instead of repeatedly expediting the same exceptions.
• Certify monthly service and margin bridges to the board with every material assumption disclosed.
• Transfer network decisions, customer recoveries and the review cadence through two successor-led cycles.

Candidate qualifications

• More than twenty-two years in multi-modal logistics with national COO or comparable P&L operating responsibility.
• Recovered large logistics contracts after control-tower, routing or network-planning failure.
• Deep understanding of transport economics, warehouse flows, spot procurement, claims and service-credit exposure.
• Demonstrated ability to reconcile customer promise, physical events and contract contribution at lane level.
• Experience replacing misleading operational metrics with auditable end-to-end service and cost evidence.
• Executive presence with demanding customers during live service recovery and contract-reset negotiation.

Non-negotiables

• Available in Mumbai within two weeks and able to travel across network nodes weekly.
• No current interest in carriers, warehouse vendors or control-tower suppliers used by the business.
• Prepared to make transparent customer-allocation decisions during constrained capacity.
• Can commit exclusively for twelve months and the planned successor overlap.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm your earliest Mumbai start and readiness for weekly national node travel.
2. 49 words maximum. Which logistics contract margin did you restore, from what baseline and in what period?
3. 49 words maximum. What control-tower decision rule did you replace because it harmed physical execution?