Project 7: Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary stories

Every morning 5,000 entrepreneurs in Mumbai, India wake up at the crack of dawn to complete their tasks with such a clockwork precision that it leaves the management gurus all around the world stupefied. They are known as ‘Dabbawalahs’. Their job is to deliver close to a million lunch boxes to offices in Mumbai. These lunch boxes are collected from homes, processed through a human network, sorted and delivered and returned home the same day. No computer system tracks this movement. Only one error occurs in eight million transactions which has led Forbes Global, the American Magazine to give the enterprise a Six Sigma rating, an efficiency level of 99.999999.

Good Evening Fellow Toastmasters and Honored guests. Tonight, I would like to shed some light on this very successful enterprise in India and try to explore how such a simple venture by some ordinary people has such an extra ordinary story to tell.

This century old business originated when India was under the British rule. Many British who came to the colony disliked the local food, so a service was set up to bring lunch to them in their workplace straight from their home. Today, more than 200,000 lunches get moved every day in trains, bicycles and bare feet, irrespective of the weather conditions or terrorist attacks!

The BBC another other major news channels have produced documentaries on dabbawalas. Prince Charles, during his visit to India, visited them. He had to fit in with their schedule, since their timing was too precise to permit any flexibility. They hold the world record for the best time management and are also featured in Ripley’s Believe it or not.

Owing to the tremendous publicity, some of the dabbawalas are invited often by top business schools in India to give lectures on time management skills.

How have the dabbawalas managed to survive through these years of fast food? The answer lies in a twin process that combines competitive collaboration between team members with a high level of technical efficiency in logistics management.

An article in SmartManager, a leading business daily gives some key elements of a successful business and elaborates why the business of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier Association or the Dabbawalahs fits perfectly into the frame of a successful business.

The article states that the entire system depends on teamwork and meticulous timing. Lunch boxes or Tiffins as they are called, 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 single tiffin could change hands three to four times in the course of its daily journey.

At Mumbai's downtown stations, the last link in the chain, a final relay of dabbawalas fan out to the tiffins' destination. Lunch hour over, the whole process moves into reverse and the tiffins return to suburban homes by 6.00 pm.

During the earlier sorting process, each dabbawala would have concentrated on locating those 40 tiffins under his charge, wherever they come from, and this specialisation makes the entire system efficient and error-free. Typically it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to search, assemble and arrange 40 tiffins onto a crate, and by 12.30 pm they are delivered to offices. This is by far, one of the best examples of competitive collaboration.

In a way, MTBSA's system is like the Internet. The Internet relies on a concept called packet switching. In packet switched networks, voice or data files are sliced into tiny sachets, each with its own coded address which directs its routing.

These packets are then ferried in bursts, independent of other packets and possibly taking different routes, across the country or the world, and re-assembled at their destination. Ironical that the Dabbawala system is so similar to one of the greatest technological discoveries of the century, when most of its members didn’t even go to high school and even those who did never got technological exposure!

The range of customers of this association 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, for reasons of economy, hygiene, caste and dietary restrictions or simply because they prefer whole-some food from their kitchen, rely on the dabbawala to deliver a home cooked mid-day meal.

Logistics is the new mantra for building competitive advantage, the world over. Mumbai's dabbawalas developed their home-grown version long before the term was coined. In the dabbawalas' elegant logistics system, using 25 kms of public transport, 10 km of footwork and involving multiple transfer points, mistakes rarely happen. How do they achieve virtual six-sigma quality, held only by top league companies like GE, Motorola, with zero documentation? For one, the system limits the routing and sorting to a few central points. Secondly, a simple color code determines not only packet routing but packet prioritising as lunches transfer from train to bicycle to foot.

Although the service remains essentially low-tech, with the barefoot delivery boys as the prime movers, the dabbawalas have started to embrace technology, and now allow booking for delivery through SMS. A web site, mydabbawala.com, has also been added to allow for on-line booking, in order to keep up with the times. The dabbawalas have also moved out from Mumbai and replicated such models all over India. Today, this even exists in the Silicon Valley in US.

This service charged only USD 4 per month results in a turnover of USD 20 million per year resulting in a pay of USD150 per month for each employee which is reasonably high in Indian standards.

Here nobody is an employer and none are employees. Each dabbawala considers himself a shareholder and entrepreneur. Hence every one is treated equally.

Personally, I feel that the reason the dabbawalas are so successful is because they do not know how successful they really are. They don’t know what a Six Sigma rating is, they don’t know what it means to be covered by Ripleys, they don’t even know who efficiency is. This ignorance means that they are firmly stuck to the ground and hence keep striving to beat their own set high standards.

Fellow Toastmasters and Honored guests, the Gandhi cap donned, ordinary Dabbawalahs of Mumbai are not just a representative of a business or culture in India, but it symbolizes the ideal ‘Indian dream’, the irrepressible energy to somehow get ahead, to survive in the most difficult circumstances, to be clear about personal objectives, to work for a desired end irrespective of the means and most of all, having the confidence to believe in their dreams and convert them into reality.

As Roosevelt once said, "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."