2° Talks with
Shankar Ramalingam | Net-Zero Logistics, Scope 3 Emissions & AI in Supply Chains

How do we enhance the rider earnings a little bit more through which the rider practice is sustainable uh in his own way which is enabling the customer to achieve the entire TCO. First trust somebody because when you start trusting somebody you you get out of a fear sense and all the things that you make are then you believe in the person you you believe in it capability and the ability to lift people along with you. Once you measure and you are transparent about it and you make it visible to everyone I think small the first step is already taken and then improvements will follow. In link mind we are saying that our AI will actually look at what is the driver behavior that we would like to get so that the driver earns more and the driver earns more in his own way. We are making it very practical for him. he will be retained in the business better and he will use the ED vehicle because of his earnings will go up and therefore doubles towards the larger cost of sustainability or larger size of net bureau in the overall sense. Yeah. Hi, welcome to two degree talk a fits all talk on sustainability and climate action where we are trying to bring uh people who are creating impact in the field of sustainability and climate action. Uh today with me is one of the most uh we can say a guest who has impacted a lot in my career. Um Mr. Shankar Ramaling. Uh he is uh my ex- boss and mentor. Uh he has around 40 years of experience across varied industry. Uh starting from God uh in his last profile he's still working even after retirement he's still working and supporting startups and he's still mentoring them. Plus he has also founded a founder of a new company uh which is leading uh to the uh next horizon. Uh so welcome sir uh to this podcast. Thank you Anand a pleasure being here with you. It's been a long journey that we both had and nice connecting with you back and being on your podcast. So sir uh if I see it has been a long journey and generally uh 40 years plus starting from Godidge uh mostly in the manufacturing industry to start with then service industry and now in a startup world uh and if you would would like to sum up this entire journey in kind of one sentence or so I would not like to restrict one sentence but journey like that how how will you describe this journey it's a tough call to summarize a 40-year journey in one sentence. But let me try to give my best. Uh it's been a four decade long journey. I've worked with legacy companies like Godidge. Uh then I moved on to Aishure, then Tata Motors, TVS, uh and for a brief while an international company called Photon and now I'm my own on startup. Uh it's been a journey of building, transforming and learning all through and I've thoroughly enjoyed your journey. But one thing cutting across sectors, cutting across size, whatever I've done, if I were to summarize it in two sentences, it's all about clarity of purpose and execution discipline. I think if you get these two things right, I think then the middle will keep moving and you move along the journey of your career. Uh that's what is I think is keeping you moving even after a huge uh long career of 40 plus years with the same energy what I have seen I think 10 to 12 years back. 12 years. Yes. almost the same energy I'm seeing currently also. Okay. So just for the uh sake of the audience uh uh if something uh if you would like to describe or tell something one hobby or some quakes about you uh which most of the people might not be knowing something someone definitely close to you might know might be knowing but most of the audience who is listening uh if they would like to know about you any hobbies or any quakes well something which many people don't know about me is I do cook well I do cook south Indian food that's something many people don't know And I also listen to old Tamil songs, movie songs, especially live performances. So these are two things which have generally not put it out in the public. But yeah, maybe first through your podcast people will come to know about it. Yeah. So I think yes uh I have stayed uh in Chennai for around 3 years or so and uh I'm fond I'm still the kind of miss Chenny food. I like them a lot and generally when I visit Chenny the first thing I try to see is restaurants which I'm missing out but generally very good and diverse food they have also as a city. Uh now uh I think out of this this again is a tough question according to me because you have worked in different industries in different role and capacity. uh what according to you is one of the most challenging role uh and which you liked a lot and it kept you pushing kind of thing definitely startup is one I think that might be uh but I don't want to put words uh because your career has been very very long so only one challenging role or assignment okay I mean though you said it's a tough question to answer it's a simple question to answer the most challenging part of my career was the IPO project lead work that I did for the last two years of my career I worked with the uh chairman of TVS supply chain Mr. Dh directly and we were into taking the company public and I was leading the project. So it involved a deep amount of coordination both internally cutting across finance, legal operations and uh business teams and also with the external agencies which were the investment bankers, the law firms, the audit firms, PR agency etc. So it was the most exciting part of the journey and that was a culmination of a end of a four decade of career. So I enjoyed it thoroughly and the best part of it was when standing on the uh NYSE uh platform when the gong rang and we could see the TVS sticker SCS sticker and the share price get listed. It was a dream come true for thousands of people across the globe who had thought about a journey 15 years ago that this company will go public and I'm glad that I could play a very leading part in it along with the entire team out there. So that is the most exciting part of my career. Uh definitely definitely IPO is something which culminates that's I think major goal of most of the company. Uh so uh outside the career something which has kept you kind of grounded uh because you have achieved a lot in life according to me and most of us we inspired mother to be something achieved something like you and I think have the same energy at your uh whatever you have achieved after that also same energy and vigor so what is something which has keep you grounded or so any well uh what keeps me grounded is the kind of interaction that I have people with who work on the shop floor. Say let's take the current job that I am I'm I'm co-founding a company link miles which is into last mile delivery business. So when you talk to the riders, the boys and the girls or when in my previous assignment when I was a CEO of TVS supply chain, when you talk to the shop floor executives or to the warehouse operators, the amount of knowledge and the insight that you get from them would be far better than what you would get when you are sitting in a boardroom or when you're talking to somebody. the frontline people really tell you the realities of life and those realities of life are what exactly helps you in scaling up any business or whatever it is. So that's something which I always look forward to and I'm deeply connected with the people on the ground and that keeps me grounded as well to understand this is the reality with which we are building a business. Yes. Uh definitely that. Now before shifting gear to some other segment uh what in your long career of 40 plus uh what is one piece of advice that you still remember? I remember at least two three advices very very vividly from you and last one I think I just was telling before this podcast with you that you don't only need to work hard you need to sell yourself also that's still there in my mind and there are many lot but some advice that still stand out for you in last 40 years that you still follow and you think it's something that you can share with the audience I'm I'm first of all glad that you know you resonate so well and you remember what I talked bought a couple of years ago and that's made an impact in you and you're one of the most successful entrepreneurs budding entrepreneurs and I'm glad that this is resonated with you and I've been able to mentor you or help you to some extent coming to my life I would say that you know trust is something that I learned long back in life that first trust somebody because when you start trusting somebody you you get out of a fear sense and all the things that you make are then you believe in the person you you believe in his capability and the ability to lift people along with you. So always they say that you know when you grow you have to lift people along. So the trust enables me do that and the second thing is all your decisions are easy because you don't go with a fear that what would happen because I believe uh I give the lot of things that trust as a core and this I learned way back maybe in the in the fourth or fifth year of my working career and therefore I still practice it and I value it very much completely agree because the my nature is also same kind of I blindly trust most of the thing as it is status quo and I think that give anybody a chance to break my trust otherwise I am very very happy I trust everyone uh I resonates completely with that now let's come to the core section of this podcast where we talk to the guest about sustainability climate tech space uh because most of our audience wants to know real life example uh what is happening in this and how we can contribute to the environment so my first question would be uh you have experience diverse experience in the manufacturing side of nursery and then service. So how you have entered into the sustainability space through your new startup uh what uh what brings to you what you have thought and why you are trying to solve it right now. Okay, this is a interesting story. I mean uh I stay in a uh in an apartment complex where there are about 500 flats and every day I take a walk around and in the evenings especially and in the evenings around 8ish when I walk around I see literally hundreds of delivery boys coming to deliver something. So uh this thing of you know the quick commerce e-commerce consumption that's taking place in India is an exciting arena to be in because everybody wants convenience and but when I deeply thought about it convenience is coming at a cost to environment today uh because uh there is a all the guys that I see coming and delivering in the last mile be it in with the three wheelers, two wheelers or whatever it is are using ICE vehicles and I thought that look is there a solution that we can find where without compromising on the convenience or the consumption pattern that has evolved in India. Uh what can we do to make it sustainably and that that sort that thought process came to me and I said we must do something about it and at link miles we thought that electrification of the last mile is one of the ways in which we could have this convenience but yet coming at no impact or less little impact to the environment and sustainability as a way forward. Okay. Uh I just thought so that so how does this name come link mile so mile is last mile huh is it part of that yeah is past mile is how do we link consumption with the uh uh you know the last mile convenience that we want to that's how we came up with this link miles as a concept for our business nice name uh now uh this is also some part of the lostic industry prior to this you were working with TV supply chain that was also mostly into the lostic side of the business So uh I was reading data so supply chain contributes almost if we see uh even ROM rail supply chain uh then it contribute more than 50% of the global emissions in terms so definitely it's plays a very very important role logics in the uh sustainability sector. So uh can you give some example how lostics can play a role in uh our net zero target that globally we have taken by 2050 or 2060 70 in India case how is it going to play a role what are some of the uh real life example you can give I think uh sustainability and net zero target is something that has to be really uh evolved and it has to be practiced uh logistics can play a great role I mean coming from a supply chain background we always look at how do we solution and how do we deliver value to our customers. Now the part of logistics that we always used to do was in two areas which is in the area of cost or in the area of delivery or quality of service but from there if you have to move into zero emissions and zero uh uh and doing it sustainably. So I think the mindset should shift from just in time to just in impact if I can to use a new word. How do I reduce the impact by doing all this? uh one of the things that we could probably look at is how does we do electrification of the entire fleet whether it's midmile last mile how do we have a shared infrastructure because infrastructure is one more area where if you are able to share the infrastructure then it will be easy for uh the the lesser the carbon prints that is left out in moving material from a point to b point and another area where of course you guys are working on very heavily is in packaging that's an area where I thought that warehousing packaging and in transportation especially in the last mile electrification would play a significant role from logistics what we can contribute to net zero as a target that one company takes forward yes yes definitely and in at least for India I think 13% GDP lost is part of the so I think if we can work on that uh not only it will improve the GDP and it will also improve the overall carbon footprint uh per per capita GDP uh GDP. Now uh let's uh talk about as we are talking about I was telling okay if we work on this side we might improve our GDP also in that sense by reducing this 13 from 13% to some other single digit that's the target of the global major developed nations. So it shows that by improving sustainability or lost you can also uh improve cost maybe bring the efficiency but uh most of the I think uh you can say end users see sustainability as a cost burden for them they don't relate sustainability comes also with cost efficiency they generally see if you are paying something for the sustainability it will come with an additional cost uh how can we address that for any customer how we can solve. I will tell you example when we were starting packaging reusable packaging returnable packaging people were thinking because it comes at a heavy capex it will increase their cost but in most of the cases we have been able to reduce cost for our customer similarly I think will be the story for uh link miles whatever you are delivering to your customer uh so how do you address that for the customer so customer might be thinking how do you give that message to customer no it's reducing cost also yeah I think uh sustainability is uh something that we need to look at it from a strategic sense and when we're looking at sustainability as a strategic sense the first thing that I would recommend people to look at is total cost of ownership rather than looking at it in a siloed manner of what the exact cost is at link miles if you look at it we are looking at sustainability very differently because we know last mile is inefficient and the TCO that or the total cost of ownership which an electric vehicle is supposed to deliver to a customer is not getting delivered and that's because there are a lot inefficiencies in the system and we are trying to address those inefficiencies. The first one would be how do we utilize the asset better. How do we solution and give the customer something that we are able to monitor the operational metrics that we are able to deliver more value for the same cost that they are incurring. And the third one in the ecosystem especially if the rider how do we enhance the rider earnings a little bit more through which the rider practices sustainable uh in its own way which is enabling the customer to achieve the entire TCO. So this is how I feel that with a little bit of solutioning a lot of use of technology and asset utilization principles we can deliver sustainability at a lower cost which is exactly what we have embarked upon in link miles to do it. So yeah, I completely relate to that because uh we were analysis data for one of the company I will not name them uh it's on the similar space uh for carbon credit project and we saw that only 40 to 50% of their fleet is getting utilized most of them remaining are idle I don't know maybe the reason reason can be something driver or they're not getting something like that but yeah the first point is complete utilization and TCU concept. I think that will solve the overall value creation or cost uh optimization for any customer. Now uh coming to the scope 3 side of the uh emission uh because when we talk about supply chain it's mainly scope 3 for most of the company uh it's a huge for most of the manufacturing company 90% plus is scope 3 emission and it it constitutes around almost 15 elements in that. So if somebody is trying to solve scope 3 emission for them kind of just starting to solve what do you think is the lowhanging fruit or first thing they should start targeting so that they get immediate result. Okay. Uh first thing is I think anything that we need to improve we need to first measure. So I would rather say go one step further down and say that first everybody should measure correct what is the carbon that they are kind of emitting right now and how they can get a visibility on that. So visibility is number one that I would put into. Once we have visibility, I think uh there will be definitely transparency that will be there because across the value chain everybody would know what exactly they're contributing and how it is. So the early uh uh the lowest hanging fruit would be visibility and then taking some baby steps in starting somewhere and saying that I would go about improving it. It could be in uh electrification of their fleet in the last mile or it could be some simple things that they do in their manufacturing setup. But I would rather say that once you measure and you are transparent about it and you make it visible to everyone I think small the first step is already taken and then improvements will follow and so forth. So knowing where you stand that's the starting starting point. That's a starting point. Completely agree. Uh now coming to your startup journey, entrepreneurship journey uh and you mentor also lot of startups. So if you want you want to give some piece of advice how to do this mindset shift because most of the startup I think till one or two years back they were chasing multiples valuations and revenue uh topline and they were not growing sustainably in that sense. So one mindset shift that you would like to guide them so that they start thinking their business sustainably from the day one itself. Um I think growth is obviously business is all about growth and everybody should drive growth and I'm completely for it but I would like to slightly change the narrative to saying it's not either sustainability or growth or it is not sustainability at scale and not for me now. I think sustainability must become a core design principle of every business if an entrepreneur has to really succeed. What do I mean by this? What I mean by this is sustainability should get embedded in every activity that we do and that will automatically attract the right kind of investor and obviously the right kind of valuations thereafter. It will attract the right kind of talent. It will have the right kind of uh customers and it will have the right kind of customer experience and it should get embedded into your product design. So if you look at growth in silo and sustainability in silo, I think all what you say would be the way people will grapple with is it for me now or is it the right stage. But if you change it into a design principle where you are looking at it from a everything that you do from a from a first principle basis then I think it becomes easier to say that sustainability gets embedded in everything that we do whether it's attracting investors capital or whether it is in talent or whether it is in customer or customer experience. Yes. And now I think this is uh the section that I asked my team to introduce at the last moment because wherever I'm going I'm seeing yes it is playing a very very important role in each and every segment uh that's the technology and that also AI largely so from your because you have definitely because of the longer journey that you have uh around I think five years back I don't think AI was making such a create was creating such a impact But right now we are seeing AI is creating an impact in each and every segment. So uh any thought or any use case that you think AI will play role uh in the decarbonation side of the journey or you can say supply chain or logistic side of the journey. I think AI is a gamecher. I mean I have lived here for long enough to understand. uh I can take back I tell all my team members as well in the '90s when we started off with something called internet nobody knew how internet is going to change life at that point in time today we know how it has really changed whether it's in terms of content communication or in terms of collaboration or in terms of commerce in every area that you can look at it internet has changed the way we lived I think AI is something as mega change game changer as it is and you're right it's happening in the last 2 years and definitely everybody should embrace it. Today it's a very big black box and it's uh if I can use the word sexy to say AI but it will go beyond this and it will make us live better. I can give you a small use case what we are trying to do in link miles. So in link miles we are saying that our AI will actually look at what is the driver behavior that we would like to get so that the driver earns more and the driver earns more in his own way. We are making it very practical for him. he will be retained in the business better and he will use the EV vehicle because of which his earnings will go up and therefore that is towards the larger cost of sustainability or larger cost of net zero in the overall sense. So even simple experiments that you take where you put it into practical use where it makes meaningful sense to the ground operators I think that would be a very simple use case that we as a startup are using it but there are multiple areas in which whether it's asset utilization cross deployment of assets or whether it is in your business how do we track and trace the uh assets that you're sending along with your transporting vehicles there multiple cases in which AI can play a significant role in ensuring that we do business sustainably and it's a win-win for everyone. There's some great takeaways from this section of sustainability and technology and climate tech. Uh so I would like to end this round and the last round is uh some quick fire questions we'll ask uh just so that uh audience knows you also better in that sense. Uh are we ready for that? Sure. So uh one startup trend you are excited about in 2025. I would say that's the place where sustainability meets fintech. I think we have all talked a lot about sustainability but if sustainability is not funded enough then I don't think sustainability can really take off. So there are exciting fintech companies that are coming in where they're going to look at outcome based funding and I think that's a trend which I'm very excited about. uh net zero overused buzz word or essential reality. It's an essential reality. Today it's a overused buzz word but it's an essential reality. I think it's a it's a word for survival in the future from reality it will become a survival word. So any recent book or the past book or podcast that you recommend to every founders? I mean one podcast which I listen to very extensively is and they've come back again is first principles uh by the Ken they interview all the successful founders in India uh all the people who have made it big and it's a very interesting podcast they had stopped it for a year Rohan Dharmmakumar and it's come back again so I listen to it very extensively learn a lot from it and I would recommend every budding founder to listen to it as far as possible okay uh definitely I will listen I I have not listened to him till now. Uh morning routine uh is it structure or spontaneity? Morning it always starts with spontaneity. I'm an afternoon guy. Okay. Over the period of the day it becomes more structured. And if that's the last question if you could solve one sustainability challenge overnight what would it be? I would like to see every gig delivery worker given a EV and a meaningful earning and they get dignified living. And if I'm able to transform that in the next 5 years, I think that would be the most satisfying moment for me. Every single gig worker in the country riding a EV and not being working in a very polluted environment. That was very heartfelt message and I think uh that that was the last question. So it thanks thank you for giving your time. It I will say for me it was very very insightful and I know my audience will also agree with it. It has been very very insightful session from your side. Some real life practical examples we have come to know. Uh thank you again sir for coming and uh sharing your thought wisdom and knowledge of last so many years. Thank you Anand. Thank you. It's a pleasure being here on a podcast with you. We both work together for a long time, but uh I'm seeing you successful and fits all and growing and uh your podcast is definitely going to reach out to lots of people. Wishing you all the very best. Thank you. Uh so yeah, that's the wrap for today's episode. For everyone who wants to understand sustainability, make a career in this or want to have some real life time examples, please stay tuned to this two degree talk uh which comes every week for you. Thank you.