
Business lessons from India's dabbawalas (99.9999% accuracy) - tortilla
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11707779
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patio11
This strikes me as another in the long line of "Wow, weird non-white
foreigners must be able to do absolutely impossible things!" thinking. c.f.
the obsession with Japanese management in the 1980s. We do darn impressive
feats of engineering here but they're not magic.

One error in 6 million deliveries? _Come on_. Has there ever been an attempt
to measure the error rate in any sort of statistically rigorous fashion? It
should be really bloody simple -- interview 400 customers chosen at random,
ask if they've had something not delivered in the last month, last six months,
etc. (This will not have nearly enough resolution to detect the difference
between 99.999% and 99.9999% accuracy but, _ahem_ , I think we won't quite
need to be that exacting.)

[Edit: Other sources cite the error rate as 1 in 16 million. Multiple
different numbers which all stand for "arbitrarily small" do not give me
confidence in the strength of this urban legend.]

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psranga
Article sounds condescending.

Did the "management gurus" compare that alleged accuracy to FedEx's and
USPS's? A person who you know takes a low-value article and coordinates with
approx 10 others to deliver it within a few miles by sheparding it on a
commuter train. Wow, brilliant! Compare this to Fedex and USPS where hundreds
of random strangers cooperate to safely deliver very high value goods through
bureaucratic hurdles like customs across countries reliably. Or the systems
the USPS has to prevent theft of high-value articles like DVDs, million+ of
which are mailed every day.

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davidw
> Compare this to Fedex and USPS where hundreds of random strangers cooperate
> to safely deliver very high value goods through bureaucratic hurdles like
> customs across countries reliably.

Having dealt with Fedex and UPS in Italy, I think I'd willing to take a chance
with the Indian guys. True story: my dad sent me my birth certificate via
Fedex, and after a week it still hasn't arrived. Finally, I get a call from
Fedex, telling me it's been held in customs until I agree to pay the import
duties. "Import duties, WTF?!" was esentially my reaction. It turns out my dad
had declared a value of $40 for the shipment, which was, in effect, the
replacement value of the document if it had been lost. After a bit of hemming
and hawing, the Fedex guy admitted that the resale value of the birth
certificate was zero and shouldn't be taxed, and it showed up a day or two
later. It bears repeating that I was not talking with an Italian customs
official, but Fedex, who are supposed to, as you say, "cooperate to deliver
goods through bureaucratic hurdles".

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ars
And? He wrote $40, so that's what they believed. You explained it was paper
and they delivered it. Sounds like a success story to me.

~~~
davidw
The contents were clearly labeled, and it took more than a week to deliver
something that was sent via Fedex's express service - it should have been
there in a matter of days, so I didn't get what I paid for in any case. I had
to argue with them (it actually took more than one phone call) that there was
no resale value. I've used Fedex a lot in the US, and here in Austria, too.
Compared to their usual service, this was no success story.

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bk
This article is rambling and lacking substance. Wikipedia has some more
information:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala>

