Friday, June 7, 2013

Dabbawalla

Six sigma is a system that seeks to reduce errors to less than 3.4 errors per million operations. What if I told you that it was possible to greatly exceed this standard? Can you imagine a company that delivers 2 million packages every day using 5,000 employees, and make less than one mistake every 16 million deliveries?

Can you believe that such a company has existed for over 125 years with no work stoppages? The dabbawallas of Mumbai pickup lunches from people's homes and deliver them- still hot- to the breadwinner's workplace 2 million times a day, and they make less than one mistake per week. They do all of it without a single piece of modern technology.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Fascinating article and concept, unfortunately something we'll never be able to achieve in this country. Work ethic isn't being instilled in too many people around here anymore. Nor is pride.