Last-Mile Logistics Optimisation, 22% Cost Reduction

This reflects the type of challenge our consultants are built to solve, drawn from real industry experience. The cost-per-delivery had crept to ₹68 against a ₹55 target. Every month the operations head would present the number, the CFO would ask why, and the honest answer was a mix of things that were true but not actionable: traffic, failed deliveries, re-attempt loops. What nobody was tracking, until we mapped it, was that 14% of deliveries were failing on the first attempt, each generating a ₹29 re-attempt cost that nobody had named or owned.

Three weeks of diagnostic work across five delivery zones, focused not on confirming costs were high but on tracing exactly where each overage rupee came from. Route density was the main driver: too few drops per kilometre on high-cost zones. Route clustering was applied. A pre-delivery WhatsApp confirmation was built, simple, not sophisticated, that cut the category of failed deliveries that should never have failed: wrong address, recipient absent, gate closed during delivery window. Micro-warehousing was piloted in two dense postcodes.