I walk into the gap nobody owns, and close it.

Making the numbers stick

In our daily team huddles, we gave the team a few details on the day's tasks, what was expected, and a bunch of numbers nobody remembered. The team deserved to see their numbers, not hear them once.

So I built a demo of a dashboard that could stay on display all day: the format, colors, layout, and content. I showed it to my peer and my manager together. They both liked it, my manager asked the two of us to finish it together, and within a week the team had a dashboard showing their goals, achievements, top performers, peer appreciation, and a suggestion box.

As Department Supervisor for receiving, I also took receiving accuracy from 82% to 95% in 90 days and ranked #1 in the district, using AI-assisted bottleneck analysis and corrective actions such as barcode-scanning compliance.

I did not start here. I started at the front-end desk.

Starting again, at the cash desk

I came to Canada eight years into my marriage, leaving my wife and family in India, and started over like a fresher, sharing a house with roommates. I had managed diverse teams at Flipkart and worked in a bank and a manufacturing unit. Now I had no Canadian experience, a new work culture, customer expectations I was not used to, and an accent I had to learn to be understood in. It was overwhelming at the start.

On my first day on the front-end desk, a customer returned a product and asked for her refund in cash, partly in cents and loonies. To me, a one-dollar coin was just a one-dollar coin. I did not know that Canadians call it a loonie, or that the two-dollar coin is a toonie. I was confused. I did not guess and I did not bluff. I asked my manager, we completed the refund together, and the customer explained the names to me.

Asking was faster than pretending, and my motto was simple: the customer gets served first, without waiting longer than they should.

I stayed calm, stayed organised, and kept doing the next useful thing, trusting the rest would fall into place. The rules and plans around me kept changing, and I kept adjusting, choosing long-term direction over short-term comfort. Within three years I had earned multiple promotions and was leading a team of 15-20 as Head Cash Supervisor.

Launch big, then clear what is stuck

I managed the launch of a 900,000 sq ft greenfield fulfillment center: I trained the staff on SOPs and process flow and gave hands-on support through the ramp-up. Dispatch output grew 440%, from 25K units in the first month to full capacity after 2 months.

Then I owned liquidation and returns sales for a PAN India portfolio of 25-30 B2B SMB buyers, and reached ₹110 Cr in monthly revenue against a ₹100 Cr target. While auditing FCs in North India, I found about 1,200 Prexo phones that had been stuck for more than 8 months. I worked with finance and operations to create manual lots and clear them.

Everything was new

At a fast-moving D2C start-up, I had to decide how the warehouse should look and which layout would reduce associate footsteps and raise productivity. I chose the vendors for the warehouse setup, from infrastructure to delivery partners to stationery. I set up the back-end flow with the marketing and IT teams.

Everything was new, and it was fulfilling. I learned as I went and put in the extra hours to push beyond what I already knew. Throughput grew 204% in 3 months.

Leading my buddies

Flipkart was an experience in itself: a proactive work culture with a bias for action. The company saw I could lead and gave me the responsibility of leading my peers, a natural path to promotion.

They were my buddies. They relied on me and I relied on them, and it was never an awkward moment. Together we handled 150,000 units a day, closed inwarding issues within a 48-hour TAT, and held a 100% audit score every quarter.

Where it started

I joined IMFA as a fresher straight out of university, and it was my first job in logistics. I got the chance to learn basic Incoterms, the transport modes (rail, road, and sea), transit licenses, and how to work with 3PL partners, railway authorities, and service providers on the logistics of minerals and raw materials. I learned them quickly, so I could use them in my daily work.

I did not stop at learning. Each location kept its own data, and the company only received summary highlights in a dump from all locations. Nobody owned the data end to end, and its inconsistency made supply chain planning challenging and time consuming. I used what I had learned to integrate it into one comprehensive dataset in Excel that tracked every movement, from the time raw material was ready for pickup to the time it was sold and dispatched. We ran with zero demurrage and detention.