vincent
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:13:59 +0000
Whilst on a customer visit [*1] in Mumbai, India, the topic of the Tiffin Box delivery industry was raised as an example of “manual CEP” [*2]. This is where office workers get their lunch (tiffin) box delivered from home to work at around midday by a delivery network of thousands of “dabbawalas“. So this is a process of multiple source addresses (imagine homes across Mumbai), multiple destinations (imagine office cubes across Mumbai), using no written instructions (dabbawalas were often illiterate), in “human” real-time, with a negligible error rate, in use since the 1880s …
This somewhat puts us in our place regarding our discussions on CEP for transport, logistics, baggage handling, RFID, the need for BAM and SLAs, etc etc!
Notes:
[1] This is a “customer master data management” application involving TIBCO CIM for the MDM part, augmented by TIBCO BusinessEvents for business rule processing against new master data events. This is an additional use case than those described* earlier on CEP and MDM.
[2] Apparently this a Harvard Business School business case study, and interestingly the dabbawallahs are not at all immune to change.


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