Priyanka Bharadwaj
Who writes this
I spent the first five years of my career at Toyota; I built a strong foundation in operations, planning for Toyota's engineering division in India. Since then, I've lived in Spain (where I did an MBA) and worked inside three very different networks:
- Lazada, Southeast Asia - Operations Consultant
- Amazon, UK - Head of Strategic Supply Chain for three categories
- Delhivery, India - VP, Operations Planning & Control Tower
The stints were short, but long enough to learn that running a network requires a nuanced understanding of the region, including its geographical limitations, unique weather conditions, critical highways, a festival calendar that moves with the moon or the impact of a bandh or a protest. What's normal in one market can be an incident in another. I saw that nuanced expertise often sits in the heads of operators, rather than in the systems that run the network.
Why this exists
Of all the networks I've worked in, India is the one I understand least well against how much it now matters to global companies today. I've been away from execution for four years, and that is long enough for things to have changed. This bulletin is how I'm catching up. Each morning I read India's freight network from public information only: weather reports, city traffic, port and vessel reports, toll-plaza truck counts, police advisories and the trade press. Then I write down what it's saying, in terms someone running a global network would recognise. Since there is no operator level data available, every rating is my judgement, and the rules behind each are on the page. Will some of it be wrong? Of course. Each Monday edition makes three calls and the next Monday scores them, in public, which is either good discipline or a slow form of embarrassment.
Built with AI
Claude, Anthropic's AI model, does the gathering and the first draft: it pulls the morning's signals, opens the sources and lays out the page. I set the rules, make the calls and edit every line. Nothing ships without a source. But I am also in the process of automating the entire stack to see what it takes to build an AI control tower with little to no human oversight.
Get in touch
If you run a network in India, or a global one that touches it, and something here is wrong or missing, I'd like to hear it. Find me on LinkedIn.