Job Description Subject Matter Expert — Transportation & Network Movement Optimisation
n Engagement: Contract / consultant Base: India (metro base of your choice), with regular travel to Andhra Pradesh — Vijayawada/Amaravati and district locations
n About the role
n 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.
n 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.
n What you will own
n 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.
n 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.
n 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.
n 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.
n 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.
n Inter-district balancing. Moving surplus to deficit districts monthly, without breaching the annual district requirement that must be protected first.
n Last-mile movement to fair price shops. Routing and load planning from stock points to shops, sized against the rest of the network.
n Responsibilities
n n Translate movement operations into a formal model: lanes, modes, constraints, cost functions, decision variables
n Specify and validate optimisation formulations for mode selection, movement planning, load consolidation and inter-district balancing
n Define the movement portion of the domain model alongside the data engineering team
n Interrogate source data — transport bills, truck sheets, movement orders, GPS traces, rate cards — and identify early what is wrong, missing or unjoinable
n 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
n Build the wagon economics model, which does not currently exist
n Assess contract terms to determine what savings are capturable now versus at next tender
n Spend time with district and godown staff to understand how truck sheets are really generated
n Pressure-test model output against operational reality before it reaches a client screen
n Support client workshops and steering reviews
n n Must have
n n 10+ years in transportation network design, freight operations or logistics optimisation
n 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.
n 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.
n 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.
n Freight cost and contract fluency — rate card structures, tendered lane rates, reimbursement models, and where they create perverse incentives
n Comfort with messy public-sector data, and the patience to work through it
n Credibility with field staff and senior officials alike, often in the same week
n Willingness to travel to Andhra Pradesh regularly, including to godowns, stock points and district offices
n n Strongly preferred
n n Experience with Indian public distribution, food grain movement or state civil supplies
n Direct experience of Indian Railways freight processes — indenting, rake allocation, siding logistics
n Telematics and GPS data analytics beyond compliance reporting
n Exposure to knowledge graph or ontology-based modelling
n Python and data analysis capability sufficient to explore data independently
n Prior work on a decision-support product rather than a one-off consulting study
n Telugu language ability (useful, not required)
n n How you will be measured
n n Quality and defensibility of the transport cost baseline — is it a number the client will stand behind?
n Credibility of the wagon economics model, built from a standing start
n A explicit, honest read on what is capturable inside existing contracts versus what needs renegotiation
n Whether recommendations are operationally executable given real vehicle and rake availability
n Whether district and godown managers accept the reasoning
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