An express courier network is a company that picks up a parcel, carries it through its own sorting centres and trucks, and hands it to a local rider for delivery, anywhere in the country within a few days. In India, it is usually just called a courier company. Its product is the network itself: the hubs, the trucks, the riders and the software that runs them.
The network has a hub-and-spoke shape. Parcels are collected in each city and taken to a hub, a large sorting centre. At the hub, a parcel sorter reads each parcel's label and sends it down the chute for its destination. Trucks, and sometimes aircraft, carry the parcels to the hub that serves the destination. There, they are sorted again by pin code and sent to the delivery centre for that area. A rider then delivers each parcel. The long routes between hubs are called line-haul routes. The network's transportation management system (TMS) plans which trucks run on each line-haul route, and when.
The largest Indian networks run on their own software, often called a logistics operating system. It does the sorting, routing and tracking for every parcel. Each time a parcel is scanned, at pickup, at each hub and at delivery, the software records the scan. So the network knows where each of its millions of parcels is.
Here is an example. A seller of children's books in Kolkata ships a ₹699 order to a customer in Kota, in Rajasthan. The network's rider collects the parcel at 5 p.m., with 60 others from the same seller. That night, the Kolkata hub sorts it onto a truck bound for a hub near Delhi. The truck covers about 1,500 kilometres in two days. At the Delhi hub, the parcel is sorted again, onto a smaller truck to Kota. The next morning, the Kota delivery centre's route optimisation software puts it on a rider's route. The customer receives the books four days after ordering them, and every scan on the way has appeared on her tracking page.
Most parcels come from online sellers. Some sellers hand over their orders directly, and others book the pickup through shipping software. Large online marketplaces hand over thousands of parcels a day. The network sends every scan to the seller and to supply chain visibility software.
India's express networks compete on price, speed and reach. The networks that lasted through years of very low prices did so by routing, sorting and forecasting better than the rest. The next contest is delivery on the same day, in India's smaller towns as well as its cities.