Hungry? Would you like to have a fresh, hot meal from home? Most managers don’t have that choice. It’s either a sandwich, a pizza or a trip to a restaurant, unless you live in Mumbai, that is, where a small army of ‘dabbawalas’ picks up 300,000 lunches from home and delivers them to students, managers and workers every working day at their desks, 12.30 pm on the dot. Served hot, of course.
And now you can even order over the Internet.
The Mumbai Dabbawala Association is a streamlined organization with 5000 semiliterate members providing a quickly door-to-door service to a large and loyal customer base. What should we learn from this unique, simple and highly efficient 120-year-old logistics system?
How has it managed to survive through these tumultuous years?
The answer lies in a twin process that combines competitive collaboration between team members with a high level of technical efficiency in logistics management. It works like this…
After the customer leaves for work, the lunch is packed into a tiffin box provided by the dabbawala. A colour-coded notation on the lid identifies its owner; destination and dabbawala. Once the dabbawala has picked up the tiffin, he moves fast using a combination of bicycles, trains and his two feet.
A BBC crew filming dabbawalas in action was amazed at their speed.
“Following our dabbawala wasn’t easy; our film quickly lost him in the congestion of the train station. At Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus we found other fast moving dabbawalas, but not our subject… and at Mr.Bapat’s ayurvedic pharmacy, the lunch had arrived long before the film crew,” the documentary noted wryly. This efficiency has marveled all management gurus. So, how do they work so efficiently?
Team Work
The entire system depends on teamwork and meticulous timing. Tiffin boxes are collected from homes between 7.00 am and 9.00 am, and taken to the nearest railway station. At various intermediary stations, they are hauled onto platforms and sorted out for area-wise distribution, so that a single tiffin box could change hands three to four times in the course of its daily journey. At Mumbai’s city stations, the last link in the chain, a final relay of dabbawalas fan out to the tiffin’s destined bellies. Lunch hour over, the whole process moves into reverse and the tiffin boxes return to suburban homes by 6.00 pm.
To better understand the complex sorting process, let’s take an example. At Vile parle Station, there are four groups of dabbawalas. Each group has twenty members and each member services 40 customers. That makes 3,200 tiffin boxes in all. These 3,200 boxes are collected by 9.00 am, reach the station and are sorted according to their destination by 10.00 am when the ‘Dabbawala Special’ train arrives. The railway provides sorting areas on platforms as well as special compartments on trains traveling south between 10.00 am and 11.30 am. During the journey, these 80 dabbawalas regroup according to the number of boxes to be delivered in a particular area, and not according to the groups they actually belong to. If 150 tiffin boxes are to be delivered in the Grant Road Station area, then four people are assigned to that station, keeping in mind one person can carry no more than 35-40 boxes.
During the earlier sorting process, each dabbawala concentrates on locating only those 40 boxes under his charge, wherever they come from, and this specialization makes the entire system efficient and error-free. Typically it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to search, assemble and arrange 40 tiffin boxes onto a crate, and by 12.30 pm they are delivered to offices.
Elegant Logistics
In the dabbawalas’ elegant logistics system, using 25 km of public transport, 10 km of footwork involving multiple transfer points, mistakes rarely happen. According to a Forbes 1998 article, one mistake for every eight million deliveries in the norm. How do they achieve virtual six-sigma quality with zero documentation?
For one, the system limits the routing and sorting to a few central points. Secondly, a simple colour code determines not only packet routing but also packet prioritizing as lunches transfer from train to bicycle to foot.
Who are the dabbawalas?
Descendants of soldiers of the legendary Maharashtrian warrior-king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, dabbawalas are proud of their Mavla legacy. They arrive in Mumbai from places like Rajgurunagar, Akola, Ambegaon, Junnar and Malshej.
“Farming earns a pittance, compelling us to move to the city. And the tiffin service is a business of repute since we are not working under anyone. It’s our business, we are partners, it confers a higher status in society,” says Sambhaji, a dabbawala.
Education till Standard VII is a minimum prerequisite. According to the President of Dabbawala association, “This system accommodates those who didn’t or couldn’t finish their studies. We have people who have studied up to Standard XII who couldn’t find respectable jobs.” Women have also started picking up as dabbawalas.
Competitive Collaboration
Dabbawala Association is a remarkably flat organization with just three tiers; the governing council (president, vice-president, general secretary, treasurer and nine directors), the mukadams and the dabbawalas. It has offices near most of the railway stations.
Here nobody is an employer and none are employees. Each dabbawala considers himself a shareholder and entrepreneur.
This decentralized organization assumed its current form in 1970, the most recent date of restructuring. Dabbawalas are divided into sub-groups of 15 to 25, each supervised by four mukadams. Experienced old-timers, the mukadams, are familiar with the colours and codings used un the complex logistics process. Their key responsibility is sorting tiffin boxes but they play a critical role in resolving disputes; maintaining records of receipts and payments; acquiring new customers; and training junior dabbawalas on handling new customers on their first day.
Each group is financially independent but coordinates with other for deliveries: the service could not exist otherwise. Each group is also responsible for day-to-day functioning. And, more important, there is no organizational structure, managerial layers or explicit control mechanisms. The rationale behind the business model is to push internal competitiveness, which means that the four Vile Parle groups vie with each other to acquire new customers.
Building a Clientele
The range of customers includes students (both college and school), entrepreneurs of small businesses, managers, especially bank staff, and mill workers. They generally tend to be middle-class citizens who prefer wholesome food from their kitchen, rely on the dabbawala to deliver a home-cooked mid-day meal. New customers are generally acquired through referrals. Some are solicited by dabbawalas on railway platforms. Addresses are passed on to the dabbawala operating in the specific area, who then visitis the customer to finalize arrangements.
Ethics
Typically, a twenty member group has 675 customers and earns Rs.100,000 per month which is divided equally even if one dabbawala has 40 customers while another has 30. Groups compete with eacher other, but members within a group do not.
One dabbawala could collect 40 tiffin boxes in the same time that it takes another to collect 30. from his earnings every dabbawala contributes a certain amount per month to the association. The amount is used for community improvement, loans and marriage halls at concessionary rates. All problems are usually resolved by association officials whose ruling is blinding.
Meetings are held in the office on the 15th of every month. During these meetings particular emphasis is paid to customer service and complaints. Their attitude of competitive collaboration is equally unusual, particularly in India. The operation process is competitive at the customers’ end but united at the delivery end, ensuring their survival over a century and more. Is their business model worth replicating in the digital age?
Pradip Thakker
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