Operational analysis of a Puchka delivery (Gol Gappa)

Just in case if you are wondering what puchka is, then for a larger good, it is gol-gappa or panipuri as it is called in north india and other parts. I do not have the statastics but I am very sure that kolkata's contribution to World's (Which will be quiet close to India's) consumption of puchkas would be sum of other top nine consuming cities put together. Delhi is famous for Chat and all the other fried stuffs but still even in chandni chowk you would not find a puchka-seller standing every 200 metres if not less, the site is possible only in kolkata. If you are a consumer, waiting for the delivery of the product (which in this case is puchka) and just by chance you happen to be an Industrial Engineer (just because you have a degree which says so) then you tend to ponder over the operations of the product development (which again is puchka). Earlier I critized the selle for the amount of time that the seller is taking in making the delivery and hence might be loosing customers which might be impatient and would walk away. I thought that there must be some flaw in his operation else you should not be having such a long waiting time. And hence came the idle brain in action and started analysing the whole value stream of the puchka preparation.
When you are analysing the problem in any system the first step is to look for the bottle-neck, which I quickly identified (even a 4th grader could have done that) and it was the process of making the mixture which he uses to put in the puchka, before stuffing it with the tangy water. I started thinking over what a similar seller in Delhi was doing and what the present puchka wala is doing, I was doing this to identify the best practise. I realised that a puchka seller in Salt lake (which is an area without any lakes in kolkata, just in case you do not know) makes fresh mixture virtually every time when a new set of customer are served, while I could weakly recollect from my experience in Delhi that a gol-gappa seller in chandni chowk always kept his mixture ready and hence his time to delivery was quicker. Identifying the problem led me jump directly to the conclusion that the puchka seller in salt lake is servicing lesser customers because he is not maintainig inventory and hence his constant stockouts may lead to reputational loss. Yes reputational loss! The puchka wala will have a reputation of a lazy and hence an impatient customer might not turn up to him and would not even refer others to the product and referral can be a big sales booster in this segment.
When the product delivery started, I realized the amount of customization that the consumer was looking for. So an old lady had eaten 10 pieces and she had different preferences for each one of them. For many of the preferences the seller had to customize a small segment of the mixture. And this old lady was not the only customer, which such varied preferences but I realized that it was only I who had not mentioned my preferences, rest all had their preferances changing with each piece. Since this extent of cutomization was alien to me, I was not even aware of what my 10 or even 5 preferences would be incase I want to excercise them.
I realised that customer here was entirely differnt from what it was in Delhi. The customer here values customized delivery of puchkas, something which a customer in Delhi do not even thinks. Since customization takes time hence waiting time is the tradeoff for this additional service. I tried to examine this mixture making part of the value chain even more closely and realised that the seller brings all the boiled masehed potatoes and it is the last stage of mixing the spices which he does on site at the time of delivery. So he has actually delayed the customization step till the very last stage and hence customer preferences could be taken into account. The system is very similar to the model which Dell computer sytems followed, they too have everything and assembles the hardware as per your preferences and hence just like the old lady you can have 10 computers with different configurations delivered at same time! Dell is considered a pioneer of this approach of customization but I am very sure that the practise of the puchka walas would have existed earlier than this. So if the founders of IBM or hewlett packard would have had puchkas in Kolkata in some poin to history and would have done similar analysis, they certainly would have encorporated this critical pratise of operations and hence Michal Dell would have had nothing new with him. Result he would have not made Dell Inc. the brand which it is today. The ultimate result, the PC market would have been highly monopolised and not oligopolistically competitive as it is today. In that case a computer would not have been of the price which they are today and people in india would have had suffered most.
So this is how owners of IBM not coming to Kolkata and having puchkas, prevented world from robbing of the IT revolution.

P.S. I am not being gender biased but I have not yet seen a female puchka seller hence all the references in the writeup are made accordingly.