Transportation Operations Manager

As the Manager of Transport Operations at Cult, you will be responsible for overseeing the end-to-end management of transport operations to ensure cost-effective, safe, and efficient movement of goods. Your role will involve strategic planning, vendor and fleet management, compliance adherence, customer service integration, and continuous process improvement to meet organizational goals. Your key responsibilities will include leveraging technology and Transport Management Systems (TMS) to plan, schedule, and monitor daily transport operations for shipments. You will optimize routing, vehicle utilization, and load planning to reduce costs and improve efficiency while ensuring timely deliveries and pickups, managing exceptions, and disruptions proactively. In addition, you will be responsible for managing relationships with transport vendors, fleet owners, and third-party logistics providers. This will involve negotiating contracts, freight rates, and service-level agreements, tracking vendor performance against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and enforcing compliance. Ensuring adherence to transport regulations, licensing, and documentation requirements will be crucial, along with maintaining compliance with company policies, environmental guidelines, and industry standards. You will collaborate with customer service teams to handle transport-related queries, complaints, and escalations, and serve as the key point of contact for internal departments regarding transport needs. Tracking transport costs, analyzing variances, and implementing cost-reduction strategies will be part of your role, along with preparing periodic transport performance reports for management review. You will identify process gaps and implement improvement initiatives, leveraging transport management systems, GPS tracking, and data analytics to improve decision-making. Key skills and competencies for this role include a strong understanding of fleet operations and logistics principles, excellent negotiation, vendor management, and contract administration skills, proficiency in route optimization, TMS, GPS tracking, and Excel-based reporting, strong problem-solving skills, knowledge of transport regulations, safety norms, and compliance requirements, good leadership and people management skills, and strong communication skills to coordinate with multiple stakeholders. To be successful in this role, you should have a Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain Management, Logistics, Business Administration, or a related field (an MBA is preferred) and 5-8 years of experience in transport operations, preferably in retail and ecommerce goods movement. Demonstrated success in cost optimization and operational efficiency improvement is essential, and exposure to AI, automation tools, and data analytics in transport operations will be an added advantage.,