We’re all familiar with bicycle couriers in major cities who provide same-day, even same-hour delivery service that overnight services like Fedex aren’t set up to handle. Until today, though, I hadn’t heard of anything as low-cost or extensive as the lunch delivery system in India. This New York Times article explains how dabbawallas (‘lunch box men’) collect tens of thousands of fresh-cooked meals from homes each day and deliver them to offices in Mumbai. Instead of B2C, it’s C2C, the ultimate in personal networks, with one family member cooking at home and the dabbawalla network ensuring the food arrives at another family member’s office, after an elegantly simple but decidedly low-tech collection and sorting system that would make Fedex proud. This works because the system was designed to meet the resources and needs of the market. Workers want fresh, home-cooked meals. There’s a large rail system throughout Mumbai. There’s available labor. Someone came up with a simple system for sorting and routing the packages. There’s a clear link between customer satisfaction and repeat business. If lunch doesn’t show up, or the wrong lunch shows up, that customer will find another dabbawalla.

In designing high tech products, software companies too often are enamored with the technology they use and lose sight of the problem they’re trying to solve. At Ipswitch our goal in developing software is to provide a simple solution that works, and not get all caught up in whether it’s using C# or Ajax or .Net any other particular technology. We pick the appropriate technology for the problem at hand, not because it’s popular, but because it can help us build simple solutions to complex problems. The dabbawalla system does just this. Deliveries are fast and reliable, which is what the customers care about. If a modern-day company were designing a lunch-delivery system today, you can bet it would be more complicated with a lot more technology involved. It’s nice to be reminded of what really matters in designing products and services.

Posted by Roger Greene
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