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US to learn supply-chain tricks from Mumbai's Dabbawalas
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Monday, 07 February, 2011, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Our Bureau, Mumbai
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Apart from the scheduled meetings with India's top space and nuclear energy administrators and corporate honchos, the US commerce secretary, Gary Locke, would also meet the famed Dabbawalas in Mumbai. Locke, who was leading a 24 US businesses on a high tech trade mission on Feb 6-11, would visit the dabbawalahs to learn about the unique logistics operation that delivered home-cooked food to thousands of people daily in Mumbai.
"This lunch delivery service, subject of management studies in the US, has been cited as a model of entrepreneurship and supply-chain management at the grass-roots level," the commerce department noted while announcing its schedule.
Dabbawalas' fame was well earned. Harvard Business School had produced a case study on the exciting story of the 4,500 semi-literate Dabbawalas collecting and delivering over 1,75,000 food packages within hours with an error-free record.
The business school urged its students to learn from the organisation's unique, simple and highly efficient 120-year-old logistics system, which relied entirely on human endeavour and didn't employ any technology.
Conducting an analysis, Forbes Global magazine also gave the Dabbawalas a Six Sigma rating of 99.999999% of efficiency in 1988 where they made only one error in six million transactions.
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