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Re:A 125-year-old delivery network that feeds Mumbai by paulkrush on Sunday May 17, 2020 @11:28AM (#23212626)
"3.4 mistakes per million deliveries". There are lessons to be learned from these guys, but I think definition of a mistake and this stat in general is, well, flexible.
Re:A 125-year-old delivery network that feeds Mumbai by wenc on Sunday May 17, 2020 @12:07PM (#23212877)
3.4 mistakes/million (also known as 3.4 DPMO = defects per million opportunities) is just a a statistic from a normal distribution. It comes from the Six-Sigma literature [1].

It's the number of rejects in a 6σ process, assuming a 1.5σ mean shift (1.5σ is an arbitrary assumption for a shift in a long-term process).

You can get a reasonable estimate through random sampling -- which is the basis for most of inferential statistics -- so it's not that flexible. If an adequately powered study was conducted (with a large enough sample size and sufficiently randomized sample), I don't see why the results can't be trusted [2]. A mistake is not that hard to classify (in logistics there are failure reason codes -- wrong address, wrong order, missed delivery, etc. and typically certain categories dominate -- the others are noise).

That said, 3.4 DPMO is kind of a magic number (sort of like 95% confidence intervals -- why 95%? Because Pearson or someone decided it and it stuck).

[1] https://www.qualitygurus.com/why-is-6-sigma-equal-to-3-4-dpm...

[2] Side: Systematic misreporting might be an issue of course, and there's not much that can be done there except design a system of incentives and penalties around it. Customer complaints and lost clients are often visible in such systems.

Re:A 125-year-old delivery network that feeds Mumbai by econcon on Sunday May 17, 2020 @11:34AM (#23212663)
It would be interesting if someone makes a complaint portal for Dabba Walla and post some statistics on how many real complaints do you actually receive.
Re:A 125-year-old delivery network that feeds Mumbai by essdas on Sunday May 17, 2020 @02:11PM (#23213893)
It would certainly be interesting, however in the absence of hard data perhaps some anecdotal evidence is better than no information:

Case 1 ------ 10 years x 280 deliveries per year x 2 deliveries per day (pick up + drop) = 5600 deliveries.

Number of mistakes = 0

That puts the error rate at < 1/5600 (or approximately 0.0002).

Case 2 ------ 4 years x 280 deliveries per year x 2 deliveries per day (pick up + drop) = 2240

Number of mistakes = 0

That puts the error rate at < 1/2240 (or approximately 0.0004).

Both cases together -------------------

Error rate < 0.00012

Re:A 125-year-old delivery network that feeds Mumbai by namdnay on Sunday May 17, 2020 @11:31AM (#23212643)
Like all statistics in India :)