This post will be devoted to explore one of
the many sets of tools for process improvement, six sigma.
But don’t worry about a tedious post with lots
of theory and boring stuff. Just a very quick overview to have some context
before travelling to India to discover one of the very few businesses that have
been able to comply with the six sigma principles!
Introduced by Motorola in 1986, today, it is used in many
industrial sectors. Six sigma seek to improve quality by identifying and
removing causes of defects or errors and minimizing variability in
manufacturing processes
A Six sigma process is
one in which 99, 99966% of the products manufactured are free of defects, that
is an error rate of 3.4 per million units manufactured, quite an ambitious
challenge!
Now we know what six
sigma is, allow me to take you to India, where there is a business that has achieved
99.9966% of effectiveness, but before that, I want you to stop thinking about bleeding edge technology, Harvard
master minds or bright recently created companies, because most of the people
that have achieved what today is the goal of the most cutting edge companies
can barely read and most of them probably never have had a computer anywhere
around their working facilities.
If you think this is not
possible, let me introduce you to the Dabbawalas. A Dabbawala is a person in
India, generally in Mumbai, who collects hot food in lunch boxes
from the residences of workers in the late morning, delivers the lunches to the
workplace utilizing various modes of transport, predominantly bicycles and the
railway trains, and returns the empty boxes back to the customer's residence
that afternoon.
There are approximately 5000 Dabbawalas in
Mumbai that deliver around 200.000 tiffin boxes every day.
A
typical day for a Dabbawala starts when the cylindrical metal tiffin boxes are
collected from homes and taken to the nearest railway station where they are
loaded onto crates and transported by train to downtown Mumbai where the boxed
will be loaded onto hand carts or carried on long trays balanced on top of
heads.
On
average one tiffin box will change hands four times in its journey from a home
kitchen to a hungry office worker. So far, so simple, however, the majority of
the Dabbawalas are illiterate and the sorting is done mostly by a system of
color coding that has hardly changed since the first tiffin was delivered in
1890.
Lunch boxes are usually marked in several
ways:
-
Abbreviations for collection points.
-
Colour code for starting station.
-
Number for destination station.
-
Markings for handling Dabbawala at destination, building and floor.
And here it comes the impressive fact; it is frequently
claimed that Dabbawalasmake less than one mistake in every six million
deliveries, equivalent of Six Sigma or better, proving to be more efficient
than the most renewed companies in the world.
If you want to know more
about the Dabbawalas, I would recommend to watch the next video, an image is
worth more than a thousand words!
