Vetri Logistics moves 340 trucks out of two yards in north Chennai. Booking a load and getting it through the gate took a working day and a half. Nineteen weeks later it took nine hours, and seven of those nine are not a software problem.
Measured 14 March 2026. Median across 8,412 consignments, Feb–Mar 2026, against an August 2025 baseline drawn from the same yards.
Timed by hand across 120 bookings in the first fortnight. Both chains below are drawn on the same 41-hour scale.
Two overnight batches accounted for 23 of the 41 hours. Nobody inside the company had a figure for this before we counted it.
Software now spends two hours. The remaining seven are a truck that is not back yet — a fleet decision, not ours.
An AS/400 running a booking and billing package written in 1997. Correct, fast and completely closed. Two people could change it; one had retired.
Eleven Excel files and a WhatsApp group per yard. The real allocation logic lived there, not in the AS/400, and nobody had written it down.
The AS/400. In fact the batches were the problem, and we kept the AS/400 as the ledger until week 17.
A booking service, a real-time credit check, an allocation engine and one app used by branch staff and drivers. The AS/400 stayed the ledger throughout and was retired in week 17, not week 1.
19 weeks, pod of 5, plus ₹6.5L for the diagnostic. No change orders.
Six Vetri engineers, hired during the build and paired with our pod from week 8. They have been on call alone since 14 March 2026.
Three of us at the Madhavaram yard for two weeks. We sat with the dispatchers on the 6am shift rather than interviewing them, and timed 120 bookings end to end by hand.
Order-to-dispatch, median, measured from the timestamp on the branch slip to the gate-pass print. Senthil Vetrivel signed the definition before we quoted the build, so the target could not be moved later.
Credit check moved off the overnight batch to a real-time call against the same DB2 tables. Nine hours came out of the chain in one release, with the AS/400 still the system of record.
Branch staff and drivers moved to the new booking app. The AS/400 kept receiving writes through an adapter, so no branch had to switch on a date.
Old and new allocation ran side by side for four weeks. We reconciled every consignment nightly; 38 mismatches, all traced to two branches still faxing dockets.
Six Vetri engineers took the pager. We measured again with the same method as week 2 and wrote the result down: 9 hours, median of 8,412 consignments.
All four measurements were taken on 14 March 2026 by Vetri’s own finance and operations teams, using our method sheet.
Measured 14 March 2026. Mean over 20 working days per period, same eleven dispatchers, same two yards.
Measured 14 March 2026. Charges raised by customers for vehicles held beyond free time, three-month average either side.
Measured 14 March 2026. Counted by observation across 40 bookings at the Madhavaram and Sriperumbudur yards.
of the remaining nine are a vehicle that has not come back yet. No software we write will move that. It is a fleet-mix decision, and it sits with Vetri’s board, not with us.
“They counted before they built anything. That fortnight is the only reason I believed the number at the end.”