1.1 Introduction

Every morning in Bombay (now Mumbai) about 5,000 dabbawallas (Tiffin carriers- Figure 1.1) collect about 200,000 lunch boxes from houses in various suburbs of Bombay, carry them in the suburban trains, and deliver them to various offices, colleges and schools around Bombay so that its citizens can eat fresh home made food. The customers are charged approximately $5 per month for this service. The most amazing fact about this massive logistics operation is that the dabbawallas almost never fail to deliver the lunch boxes to their rightful owners.

Figure 1.1: Bombay Dabbawallas

The Bombay dabbawallas is a six sigma organization (6.66 Sigma to be precise), that is, their failure rate (failure to deliver the lunch box to its rightful owner) is approximately 1 in 8 million. This high quality of service is achieved using simple processes, neither investing on infrastructure and management consultants nor reading books on strategy. There are no computer control systems to track the location of the lunch boxes during its two hour transit from Bombay houses through the suburban railways of Bombay to its owner; such as one you would normally come across with major courier companies like FedEx and UPS. Most members of the workforce of 5000 dabbawallas are illiterate. The entire logistics is coordinated by brain (or rather 5,000 brains) of these dabbawallas. Far away from Bombay, in the USA, many big...