Pace Without Process Becomes Hype

What’s the simplest way to describe your day job without it sounding like a job title?

It is to protect value. As deliveries move through our network, value is generated at every step, and my day-to-day job is making sure there’s no leakage of that value anywhere along the way. A good part of it is also prediction: looking at previous incidents and how we responded to them, and using that to get ahead of the next one — predict it first, then plug the gap before it opens up.

We’ve covered almost 95-96 per cent of India’s PIN codes at this point, barring a very few, and we’re still growing.

What’s one operational habit from your army days that still shapes the way you work today?

Situational awareness. In the army, you simply had to have it. Every operational decision demanded that you stay aware of where you were, what could happen next, and what your next step would be if it did. That has translated very well into my day-to-day work at Delhivery as well.

You once wrote that most supply chain losses aren’t hidden but tolerated. What makes these losses so easy to overlook, and how do you make them visible?

That resonates with me. That post was something of an afterthought, but what I meant then, and still mean, is this: when a system scales up, whether it’s e-commerce or logistics, to the size ours has, there are very small leakages running through it. If they aren’t checked, found or stopped, they have the potential to become a much larger cumulative loss.

And once it becomes a cumulative loss, those smaller pieces have already become a habit. That’s where, behaviourally, we need to step in, because once people see the cumulative total, they realise it’s a genuinely large number. Once they understand what’s been slipping through, nobody wants that to continue. It’s always better to be safe than sorry.

Veterans are often known for staying calm under pressure. When does composure make the difference between escalation and resolution?

In a company like Delhivery — or honestly, in any e-commerce or logistics business today — pace is of utmost importance. But pace without process becomes hype, and in the long run there’s a real possibility of the system breaking. There has to be a synergy, a balance, between pace and process.

If your processes are stable, if you have a phenomenally robust process in place, pace follows automatically. That’s where calm comes in: you have to stay calm to bring pace and process together. It’s really a matter of three Ps: people, process and pace.

In the army, it’s often said you worry about the threats you can’t see. Logistics can be much the same. What parallels do you see between the two?

Ambiguity is the thing I’d point to. In the army, you have a lot of drills in place. The processes are set so that you prepare, practise and prepare again, enabling you to handle any ambiguous situation or breakdown in the system. That’s resilience.

In logistics, the difference is that you’re working with a vast amount of data. So even if you can’t exactly see a disruption coming, you can often anticipate it. You know there’s likely to be a fluctuation here or there. Of course, there are aberrations — extreme events like what we saw during Covid, or today’s geopolitical situations — where you genuinely don’t know what’s coming or how it’s going to hit. Apart from that, though, you’re generally working with trends, somewhat prepared and able to foresee at least part of what’s ahead. That’s where the difference lies, but at the core, the DNA remains the same.

With quick commerce and the gig economy expanding rapidly, what will resilient supply chain leadership require over the next few years?

It has to be comfort with ambiguity, if I may call it that. There are so many ifs and buts built in. We were just hearing, a while back, about a company with a ship carrying $22 million worth of shipments stuck at a port. It had all the technology, all the tracking and all the data in place, and still something happened that was completely beyond its control.

That amount of ambiguity means a leader today has to be technically very sound because technology — AI in particular — is advancing at a phenomenal pace when it comes to decision-making, gathering data and helping organisations act quickly. But even so, there’s enormous scope for ambiguity, where things won’t always resolve into a neat A, B or C. There’s no plug-and-play, and there are no playbooks yet, in this age of AI.

Which operational metric do you think gets too much attention, and which one deserves far more?

From my lens, it’s speed — or pace, whatever you want to call it. I wouldn’t say it’s overrated exactly; it’s a requirement. But pace alone, at the cost of every other factor, isn’t a fully robust or viable solution.

Processes, on the other hand, are genuinely underrated. If the processes aren’t in place, you don’t get real pace anyway. Pace is what’s talked about constantly. Timelines and hourly metrics get discussed all the time, but the robustness of the processes behind them doesn’t get nearly as much attention. So from where I sit, process is underrated, while speed gets most of the attention.

Finally, for our readers, what advice would you give a young manager who wants to become exceptional in supply chain?

You have to be grounded. Operations begins on the ground. Dashboards and what’s actually happening on the ground will always have some gap between them. If you’re only looking at dashboards and not doing the groundwork — or only on the ground and not looking at the dashboards — the two won’t match.

A young leader entering operations has to start from scratch, right on the ground. Observe what’s happening around you, understand what’s actually going on, and only then raise your game to see the bigger picture. The starting point is always to observe, understand how things are moving, see what’s really happening, and only then come to the metrics.