And deliver us from deliveries...

Each day in Mumbai, around 5,000 dabbawallas successfully deliver almost 200,000 boxes containing hot cooked lunches.  These are collected from the homes of suburban office workers by bicycle, taken to a sorting depot, loaded onto a train, sorted once again and then delivered by bike to the workplaces so quickly that they are still piping hot.

If this weren't impressive enough, there is no electronic tracking system involved - no barcodes, no PDAs, no "sign here, please".  In fact, the vast majority of dabbawallas are illiterate.  The only system for getting such a vast quantity of boxes to the right place is a series of coloured markings painted on the lid of the boxes.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.  But it's not.  Dabbawalla deliveries are amongst the most reliable in the world - with only 1 mistake in every 6,000,000 deliveries.

Compare that to the 1 mistake in every 5,000 parcels made by one global courier company.  Even our beloved Royal Mail only aims to deliver 93% of 1st Class letters the next working day.

Why the sudden interest in logistic statistics?  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I'll begin...

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a new bed and paid extra to have it delivered quickly.  Using their online delivery tool, I selected to have it delivered last Tuesday when there would be someone at home.  But, we soon ran out of Tuesday and nothing had been delivered, and that meant several hours trying to crack a voice-recognition helpline to get through to a fellow humanoid... who pressed the wrong button and put me back to the start of the process.

Eventually, four departments later, they informed me that the parcel had never been dispatched and that the earliest they could deliver it would be Friday.  Cue a diary reshuffle.

Friday arrived, and to be sure I wasn't wasting valuable time again, I gave the company a ring to check it was definitely coming.  Yes.  "Guaranteed by 5pm" I was told.  And yet 5pm came and went with no sign of a delivery.

Here we go again.  (Voice recognition and Scottish accents mix as well as oil and water.)

Turns out it was never going to be delivered.  Yes, they told me that it would.  Yes, the online tracking system told me it had been dispatched.  Yes, it's been sitting in a warehouse 20 minutes along the road for 3 days now.  But, "unfortunately" they said, company policy means they require 4 working days between it arriving in the warehouse and it departing the warehouse.

So they are going to deliver it today.  Allegedly.  They've only got an hour left to do it before the whole charade begins again.

The company concerned employs the use of online tracking systems, barcodes, scanners, automated hubs and all manner of other contraptions.  One can't help feel they'd be better employing a man with a bike and a series of coloured paint splodges.