The challenge
A Pune last-mile delivery startup operating 180 driver-partners across 3,200 daily drops was hand-balancing routes every morning on a whiteboard. Customers had no delivery window so 22% of attempts went RTO on first try. End-of-day COD reconciliation took the cash team 4 hours every night — matching driver-collected cash to UPI deposits to consignment AWBs across three Excel sheets. Driver disputes about short-cash were a daily fire.
How we deployed
- Built a dispatch-optimisation engine that re-balanced routes every 30 minutes against new pickups, traffic and SLA windows.
- Pushed customer delivery-window WhatsApp at T-2h with a one-tap reschedule button — cut RTO at first attempt.
- Issued each driver a per-AWB COD slip with QR code; customer scan generated UPI link straight to the firm escrow account.
- Reconciled COD daily by matching UPI ledger entries to AWB IDs — flagged short-cash inside a driver-app notification.
- Pushed driver performance scorecards weekly on WhatsApp showing on-time, COD accuracy and customer rating.
What changed
- On-time delivery rate climbed from 78% to 96.4% across all three Pune zones.
- First-attempt success rate lifted 31 percentage points from customer pre-confirmation.
- COD reconciliation collapsed from 4 hours nightly to under 2 minutes automated.
- Driver productivity rose 34% — same fleet handled 2,400 drops daily before the rebuild.
- Driver-disputed short-cash incidents dropped 92% with QR-payment audit trail.
"My finance team used to dread 9pm. Now they reconcile the day, look at the dashboard and go home. The drivers fight less because the system tells them exactly what they collected."
— Co-founder · Last-Mile Delivery Startup