Subject Matter Expert — Transportation & Network Movement Optimisation

Engagement: Contract / consultant Base: India (metro base of your choice), with regular travel to Andhra Pradesh — Vijayawada/Amaravati and district locations

About the role

Andhra Pradesh State Civil Supplies Corporation (APSCSCL) moves rice and other essential commodities from rice mills through buffer godowns and mandal-level stock points to roughly 29,800 fair price shops. Movement runs by road within and across districts, and by rail wagon for surplus-to-deficit balancing between districts. All of it is planned manually today, with no optimisation logic anywhere in the chain.

We are building a decision intelligence platform to change that. You will own the movement side of the problem: what moves, by what mode, on what route, at what cost.

What you will own

Road versus wagon mode selection. Inter-district balancing runs on rail; local distribution runs on road. The economics of that choice — rake size, indent lead time, siding constraints, freight versus road rates, and the inventory consequence of longer rail lead times — are not modelled at all today. You will build that model from a standing start.

Movement planning from buffer godown to stock point. Source selection, load sizing, dispatch timing and consolidation, against a monthly distribution deadline and constrained vehicle availability.

Mill-to-godown mapping. Which buffer godown each mill delivers its custom-milled rice to is done by hand today. It sits at the pivot of the chain and drives movement cost directly. This is among the highest-leverage decisions in the network.

Transport cost structure and contract economics. Movement is paid through transport reimbursement on tendered rate cards. If a contract pays per defined trip on a defined lane, no algorithm can consolidate trips without the commercial model changing. You will establish what is genuinely capturable inside current contracts and what requires renegotiation — and say so plainly.

Fleet, telematics and validation. GPS validation is mandatory for most movements,



and raw traces exist but are used only for compliance. You will turn that into an analytical asset: vehicle utilisation, dwell at loading and unloading, lane-level benchmarking, billed versus actual distance.

Inter-district balancing. Moving surplus to deficit districts monthly, without breaching the annual district requirement that must be protected first.

Last-mile movement to fair price shops. Routing and load planning from stock points to shops, sized against the rest of the network.

Responsibilities

- Translate movement operations into a formal model: lanes, modes, constraints, cost functions, decision variables
- Specify and validate optimisation formulations for mode selection, movement planning, load consolidation and inter-district balancing
- Define the movement portion of the domain model alongside the data engineering team
- Interrogate source data — transport bills, truck sheets, movement orders, GPS traces, rate cards — and identify early what is wrong, missing or unjoinable
- Establish the transport cost baseline: cost per tonne moved, vehicle utilisation, empty-run rate, and road versus wagon cost per tonne-km on comparable lanes
- Build the wagon economics model, which does not currently exist
- Assess contract terms to determine what savings are capturable now versus at next tender
- Spend time with district and godown staff to understand how truck sheets are really generated
- Pressure-test model output against operational reality before it reaches a client screen
- Support client workshops and steering reviews

Must have

- 10 years in transportation network design, freight operations or logistics optimisation
- Multi-modal experience — road and rail.



Rail freight understanding is not optional for this role: rake planning, indents, sidings, freight tariffs, or equivalent bulk rail movement exposure.
- Bulk or agri-commodity movement at scale — food grain, FCI, agri-logistics, cement, fertiliser or comparable. Parcel and last-mile e-commerce experience alone is not a substitute.
- Working command of optimisation. You can formulate a network flow, mode-choice or vehicle routing problem, reason about its constraints, judge whether output is sensible, and hold your own with an OR specialist. You do not need to write solver code.
- Freight cost and contract fluency — rate card structures, tendered lane rates, reimbursement models, and where they create perverse incentives
- Comfort with messy public-sector data, and the patience to work through it
- Credibility with field staff and senior officials alike, often in the same week
- Willingness to travel to Andhra Pradesh regularly, including to godowns, stock points and district offices

Strongly preferred

- Experience with Indian public distribution, food grain movement or state civil supplies
- Direct experience of Indian Railways freight processes — indenting, rake allocation, siding logistics
- Telematics and GPS data analytics beyond compliance reporting
- Exposure to knowledge graph or ontology-based modelling
- Python and data analysis capability sufficient to explore data independently
- Prior work on a decision-support product rather than a one-off consulting study
- Telugu language ability (useful, not required)

How you will be measured

- Quality and defensibility of the transport cost baseline — is it a number the client will stand behind?
- Credibility of the wagon economics model, built from a standing start
- A explicit, honest read on what is capturable inside existing contracts versus what needs renegotiation
- Whether recommendations are operationally executable given real vehicle and rake availability
- Whether district and godown managers accept the reasoning

📌 Operational Specialist (Hyderabad)
🏢 People Tech Group
📍 Hyderabad