Logistics and supply chain is the work of storing goods and moving them from the factory to the buyer, together with the software that plans and records every step. Logistics means the storing and the moving themselves. The supply chain is the whole series of companies that a product passes through: the maker, the warehouses, the transport companies, and finally the shop or the delivery rider.
Consider a phone case that you order on a shopping app at ten at night, from a flat in Thane. The case sits on a shelf in a warehouse near Bhiwandi, on the edge of Mumbai, where many online sellers keep their stock. Software finds the shelf, a worker or a robot picks the case, and it is packed and labelled before midnight. Before dawn, a truck carries it to a sorting centre. Later that day, a rider brings it to your door. At every hand-off, someone scans the barcode on the parcel. So the seller, the courier and you can all see where it is. Recording each step in this way is called track and trace.
The first zone is warehousing and automation. A warehouse management system knows which shelf holds every item, and tells each worker what to pick next. An order management system decides which warehouse fills each order. More and more of the moving is done by robots, such as goods-to-person robots, which carry a whole shelf to a worker who stays in one place.
The second zone is road freight. Most goods in India travel by truck for at least part of the way. A large shipper, the company whose goods are moved, plans its trips in a transportation management system. When it needs a truck at short notice, it can post the load on a digital freight marketplace. Most Indian trucks belong to owners with one or two trucks each, and many of them find loads on a trucking app for owners. Two Indian rules apply to almost every trip. An e-way bill, an electronic permit created on the GST portal, must travel with most loads worth more than ₹50,000. And each truck pays its tolls with a FASTag, a tag on the windscreen that electronic tolling reads.
The third zone is ocean freight and customs. A freight forwarder, the company that books space on a ship and handles the documents for the exporter, works in freight forwarding software. At each border, customs clearance software files the documents with customs, the government office that checks goods and collects duty on them.
The fourth zone is shipment tracking. The truck, the port, the ship and the warehouse each keep their own records of a shipment. Supply chain visibility software gathers these records into one view of where every shipment is, and when it will arrive. For food and medicine, cold-chain monitoring also records the temperature at every step.
The fifth zone is last-mile delivery, the stretch from the city depot to your door. It is the most expensive part of delivery, and the only part the customer sees. Route optimisation software plans each rider's stops, and an express courier network runs the sorting centres and the riders. Many Indian buyers pay in cash at the door. When a buyer refuses a parcel, it travels all the way back to the seller, as the page on cash on delivery and RTO explains.
Much of the world's logistics software is built in India, by engineers in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi, for companies in India and abroad.