Why shipment risk often begins before the truck even moves
In India, supply chain failures rarely begin with a dramatic event in transit. They usually begin much earlier.
A shipment is packed in Baddi for movement into Delhi NCR. A pharma or healthcare load is staged in Hyderabad for delivery into Mumbai. A temperature-sensitive shipment is lined up in Bengaluru for movement into surrounding Tier 2 markets.
Open any tech publication today and you’ll read a familiar story: hand a coding project to Cursor or Copilot, walk away, and come back to a finished pull request. Hand a back-office task to an agent and it grinds through it overnight. Hand a research brief to an AI co-worker and wake up to a polished deck.These are real, impressive capabilities.
Detention and demurrage in Europe are widely treated as a port problem. Congestion, slow customs clearance, carrier delays. But in most European networks, the real cost driver is something less visible and far more controllable: decision timing.
In India, cold-chain failures rarely begin with one dramatic event.
A shipment leaves the plant on time. The reefer is running. The lane is familiar. The transporter is approved. On paper, the movement looks routine.
Then the truck pauses at a toll plaza longer than planned. It waits outside a regional hub. It loses time at a state border. It finally reaches the edge of Mumbai, Delhi, or Bengaluru and sits again before unloading. None of this is unusual in Indian operations.
In Europe, supply chains rarely fail loudly.
Shipments move on time. Infrastructure is strong. Service levels look acceptable on dashboards. Yet costs creep up, buffers grow, and exceptions consume an outsized share of management attention. What breaks European supply chains is not execution capability. It is decision density.
Europe operates one of the most efficient freight ecosystems globally. Short distances, dense infrastructure, and highly capable logistics providers allow freight to move seamlessly between ports, inland hubs, and distribution centers. From a logistics network design perspective, this efficiency is a strength. But from a security standpoint, it introduces a structural blind spot.
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I have spent a significant part of my career designing supply chain networks. Building optimization models. Running stochastic simulations. Stress-testing scenarios across regions and industries. Balancing service, cost, and inventory trade-offs in environments where small assumptions often have large consequences. The mathematics has never been the constraint.
Retailers processing a million or more order line items per day are no longer dealing with complexity at the edges. Complexity is the system.
A few days ago, SAP lost roughly $130 billion in market value from its peak in February 2025. The stock dropped to its lowest level in 17 months, and the decline wasn’t treated as “just another bad week.”
