Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Wish I could fly

With Mumbai's population increasing by the day, people are finding creative ways to travel to office. Here you see, people comfortably sitting on top of the train to reach their destination.

Mumbai's Dabbawalla's- A Six Sigma Approach

The "Dabbawalla" system that operates in Mumbai is unique and incredible in the complexity of its task, simplicity of its operation, and surprisingly low error rates for a system of its size. It is a daily service in which thousands of men carry and deliver over 200,000 lunches every day, within a three hour block of time, across the city’s 70-kilometre stretch, with each lunch box (dabba) changing hands at least four times. Yet, for all its complexity and size, it is run and managed by a group of largely illiterate rural workers using nothing more than three or four symbols crudely painted on the lunch-boxes — that, and their own remarkable intuition, teamwork, and values.