Logistics · Amazon Berlin

I run a 268-slot
logistics yard.
Then I built the
tools to run it better.

Most people who support supply-chain software have never worked a gate at 6am. I do it on shift, and I write the code that makes the shift measurable.

Rohit Thomas Logistics Lead, Amazon Berlin, Germany English (C2) · German (A2)

The site I run, drawn to scale — one cell is one real slot

Dock doors 97 of 104 in use
Parking bays 155 of 164 in use
Occupied Free Out of service Typical mid-shift state
The operation

What I actually do

The site runs two gatehouses. North checks trucks in and assigns a dock door; South checks them out again, loaded or empty. Between them sits the yard — a few hundred trailers and swap bodies that all have to be in the right place, in the right state, at the right time.

I work both the coordinator and clerk sides. The clerk seat is the hard one: you are the single point of contact between the warehouse, the marshalls on the ground, and every external carrier calling about a truck. It is relentless multitasking, and the cost of a mistake is a trailer in the wrong bay and a driver waiting.

The core discipline is that the yard management system has to be the truth. Every decision downstream depends on it, so keeping it accurate under time pressure is the job.

Role
Logistics Lead, Amazon Berlin, since 2025
Capacity
104 dock doors, 164 parking bays
Typical load
300–350 vehicles on site at once
Asset types
Prime trailers, swap bodies, box trucks, tractors, vans
Carriers
Amazon fleet plus DHL, UPS, DPD, GLS, Hermes and third-party hauliers
Systems
Yard management, outdoor dock management, Relay and FMC
The tooling

What I built for it

The end-of-shift report was a manual count. I replaced it with a read-only browser tool that reads the yard page and produces the same numbers in a second — then spent months making sure those numbers were actually right.

Live counts panel

A userscript that reads the yard table in place and reports the figures the shift actually runs on: empty primes, loaded units by carrier, free bays, units out of service. Click any number and the page collapses to exactly the rows behind it, so a count can be checked against a yard walk instead of trusted.

End-of-shift spreadsheet

Paste one export, get the handover report — zone occupancy, vehicle type against flow, carrier breakdown, capacity remaining. Every figure verified to match the live panel line for line on the same data.

Built to be audited

No network calls, no remote resources, read-only against the source system. Every cell of the page is byte-identical before and after the tool runs. That property was the requirement, not an afterthought.

Three bugs worth naming

  • The dwell-time trap. The system reports time in yard as 45:07 for recent arrivals but switches to "3 days" for long ones. The first parser silently skipped every long dweller — reporting 17 units over 72 hours when the real figure was 64. Found by sanity-checking a figure that looked too good.
  • Carrier codes lie. UPS appears under two codes, Hermes under five, and one haulier under three that share no letters. I tried fuzzy matching; it confidently filed unrelated carriers together. Replaced it with explicit pattern rules plus an unrecognised code warning — an unknown is safe, a confident wrong answer is not.
  • A yard that looked empty. A run showing zero empties turned out to be a filtered page, not a broken tool. The tool now detects an implausible data shape and refuses to report rather than reporting something false.

JavaScriptDOM extraction Excel modellingCSV pipelines PythonCloudflare Workers TableauSQL basics

Why this matters to a supply-chain software team

I am your end user

When a yard or transport platform ships a feature, someone in my seat decides in about ten seconds whether it survives contact with a shift. I have been on that side of every rollout: the field nobody fills in, the report that doesn't reconcile, the workaround that becomes policy.

That is unusual in an implementation or support team. The domain knowledge normally has to be taught. I arrive with it, and with enough engineering to read an export, reproduce a customer’s problem, and say precisely which assumption in the data model broke.

Onboarding
I can run a customer’s first configuration because I have lived the process it models
Support
I can reproduce a data discrepancy from an export instead of escalating it
Feedback
I can tell product why an operator ignores a feature, with the shift context attached
Training
I have taught this workflow to people on the ground, in a second language
Scale
Enterprise support behind me: over 30,000 clients at IBM, 95% first-call resolution
A thread running through all of it

Football data, for eight years

I was a performance analyst at Hyderabad FC before I moved to Germany, and I have not stopped since. Football Talkies is a blog I have written and maintained for years, migrated across hosting stacks myself when the old one stopped making sense.

The Kerala Super League pipeline is a Python project that pulls, cleans and publishes match data for a league nobody else covers properly — the same extract, reconcile, publish loop as the yard tooling, on a dataset I chose because I wanted it to exist.

FLAMES is a small web game running on Cloudflare Workers. Hardly serious work, but it shipped and it stays up.

Why it’s here
Nobody asked me to build these. They are the evidence that the tooling at work was not a one-off
Football Talkies
Long-running blog, self-hosted and self-migrated
Kerala Super League
Python scraping and data pipeline, published output
Certifications
Data Use in Football (AnalyiSport) · Business of Football (Open University)
Track

Where this came from

  1. 2025 — now Amazon, Berlin — Logistics Lead Yard and dock management, Relay and FMC. Built the site’s end-of-shift reporting tooling.
  2. 2024 — 2025 Tesla Gigafactory Berlin — Manufacturing Operations High-tempo production floor, tight cycle discipline.
  3. 2024 UEFA EURO 2024 — Operations Coordinator Led a team of ten at a tournament serving over 300,000 attendees. Incidents down 25%.
  4. 2023 — 2024 Picnic · Metamorph, Berlin — Last-Mile Logistics Operations Route and hub operations in online grocery.
  5. 2020 — 2021 Amazon, India — Senior Associate, Employee Resource Centre Held 95% SLA compliance, handled escalations, cut onboarding time by 30%.
  6. 2019 — 2020 Hyderabad FC — Performance Analyst Match and player data for a professional club.
  7. 2016 — 2018 IBM · NTT Data — Enterprise Technical Support Supported over 30,000 clients at 95% first-call resolution. Named Best Employee for innovation.
Education

Qualifications

MBA
Business Administration, University of Europe for Applied Sciences, Berlin. Thesis: the impact of digital payments on the economy.
B.Tech
Electronics & Communication, SRM University, Chennai
Project management
Agile & Waterfall (PMI)
Languages
English (C2) · German (A2, in progress)