Advanced Logistics Without Technology

Kevin Meyer, who writes the excellent blog Evolving Excellence is fond of referring to the "false god of the almighty algorithm".  No, he's not referring to that algorithm, but rather big software implementations that promise to bring efficiency to a corporation.  Meyer isn't against software per se, just the idea that it'll solve many of the problems that companies believe it will.  To drive home the point, he argues that many companies would be better off mapping things out on a white board, saving them millions in software costs.

On a related note, Vinnie Marchandani points to a fairly recent Times article about a massive food delivery system in Mumbai that brings homemade lunches to busy workers on a daily basis:

In India, where many traditions are being rapidly overturned as a result of globalization, the practice of eating a home-cooked meal for lunch lives on.

To achieve that in this sprawling urban amalgamation of an estimated 25 million people, where long commutes by train and bus are routine, Mumbai residents rely on an intricately organized, labor-intensive operation that puts some automated high-tech systems to shame. It manages to deliver tens of thousands of meals to workplaces all over the city with near-clockwork precision.

At the heart of this unusual network is a chain of delivery men called dabbawallas.

The word comes from tiffin dabba, a colonial reference to a box containing a light meal, and walla, the man who carries. The precision and efficiency of the dabbawallas have been likened to the Internet, where packets identified by unique markers are ferried to their destination by means of a complex network.

“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch,” said one dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury.

How do they do it?  Not with software or anything so advance:

The service is at once simple and complex. A network of wallas picks up the boxes from customers’ homes or from people who cook lunches to order, then delivers the meals to a local railway station. The boxes are hand-sorted for delivery to different stations in central Mumbai, and then re-sorted and carried to their destinations. After lunch, the service reverses, and the empty boxes are delivered back home.

The secret of the system is in the colored codes painted on the side of the boxes, which tell the dabbawallas where the food comes from and which railway stations it must pass through on its way to a specific office in a specific building in downtown Mumbai.

Really quite impressive.  Not only is it very simple, but it appears to be staggeringly efficient and mistake-free.  Here in New York, pizza shops that serve a two-block radius can't operate so well.

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