“We sell more, and somehow it hurts more”
You added dealers in three new districts this year. Orders rose. But every Monday begins with complaints: a consignment promised for Thursday arrived on Saturday, a dealer received the wrong size mix, and your dispatch manager is on the phone with two transporters at once.
Sales are growing, yet your best dealers have started stocking a competitor “just in case”. Logistics has quietly become the ceiling on how big the business can get.
What it costs
Take a hypothetical distributor with ₹2 crore of monthly sales, supplying 120 dealers. Suppose freight is 3 per cent of sales. That is ₹6 lakh a month. If poor loading and route planning forces one extra part-empty trip for every ten trips, you pay about a tenth more than needed: ₹60,000 a month, ₹7.2 lakh a year, to move air.
The larger cost is delay. A dealer who would have reordered on Thursday waits until Saturday. You have not lost the order, but you have lost two days of the dealer’s confidence and handed the competitor’s salesman an opening. Multiply that across 120 dealers and the exposure is not freight; it is the relationship.
Why it happens
Logistics is usually inherited, not designed. A distributor with 20 dealers can run dispatch from one person’s memory: who gets what, which transporter is reliable, which lane is slow. At 120 dealers the same memory cannot hold the plan.
The causes are ordinary ones:
- Orders arrive by WhatsApp, phone and email, and are batched by whoever has time.
- Dispatch is decided with no cut-off, so trucks leave half full or late.
- Nobody owns the delivery promise, so a delay is discovered by the dealer, not by you.
- Stock in the warehouse and stock on the sheet differ, and a picker finds out at the shelf.
- Transporters are chosen on habit, not on measured performance by lane.
What changes it
The fix begins with decision rights, not tools.
Name one person who owns the delivery promise from order to the dealer’s door. Set order cut-off times, so dispatch plans once or twice a day instead of constantly. Agree what “on time” means and measure it per dealer and per transporter each week. Review the worst lanes in a short weekly meeting, with the transporter’s name beside each late consignment.
Once the rhythm exists, software earns its place. A system that records every order in one place lets dispatch group loads sensibly. Tracking that records when a vehicle left and arrived makes lateness visible the same day, not a week later. Route-planning tools, including those using machine learning, can cut distance driven, but only when the order data feeding them is clean. Giving a planning tool messy orders produces a tidier-looking mess.
A useful first test is simple. Pick the ten dealers who complain most and trace their last three late consignments back to the day the order arrived. In most businesses the delay turns out to be in the first day, before anything was loaded, and that tells you where to look.
What this does not fix
Better logistics will not rescue a weak product, nor overcome road conditions, monsoon closures or a transporter strike. It will not fix a business where sales promises delivery dates that operations never agreed to. That is an organisation problem, and the cure is a conversation between sales and dispatch, not a new screen.
If you are expanding into more districts and wondering what the network can carry before service breaks, try the dealer expansion model.