The Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (NMTBSA), popularly known
as Mumbai’s dabbawalas, have a 120 year old reputation for unerringly delivering
home cooked food in lunch boxes to a huge base of customers across Mumbai. The
Association runs the successful process-driven error-free, low-investment and
high-profit making business with such accuracy it has been qualified for the
well-known Six Sigma certification.
So the question now pops up is that how do a band of 5000 dabbawalas, a lot
of them semi-literates deliver two hundred thousand (2,00,000) lunch boxes i.e.
four hundred thousand (4,00,000) transactions every day with Six Sigma
accuracy i.e. 1 mistake in every 6 million deliveries? The response has
been phrased out very eloquently by the a member of the NMTBSA
“We don’t understand Six Sigma. We are a bunch of illiterates. But we do know our prime responsibility – customer satisfaction. And to achieve that, we can put in hard work like no one else.”
So what is their Mantra of perfection? Four hundred thousand transactions
in a day is not easy to manage. It requires an infallible logistics system,
continuous effort and flawless technology, as many would like to believe. While
the former two hold true, the latter is inconsequential for this manual work
driven organization. Let us focus on some of the core aspects that drive the dabbawalas
to achieve Six Sigma excellence in other words Lean Six Sigma.
Ownership
"Ownership is a feeling that an employee has to instill in oneself, and unless you get that feeling of ownership you cannot work excellently"
Driving ownership and building this culture is an integral and important
aspect of making any organization successful. In the current organizational
scenario very few people aspire to become linch-pins within the organizations
they work for. If this culture can be ingrained within the enterprise it could
lead to a dramatic increase in employee productivity.
Simplicity
There is a popular saying with the people of Mumbai :"Our lunch can go wrong but not the Mumbai dabbawalas.".
The dabbawalas have ensured that by keeping their basic
process simple they are able to provide value and at the
same time drive greater efficiency. The process is lean,
uncomplicated (no fancy technology :) ), no complicated
process flows or algorithms to understand and interpret
which makes every dabbawalas understand and interpret the
process with minimum input.
Standardization
The delivery process of the dabbawalas has been standardized for two aspects
: simplicity and efficiency. The simple color coding system acts as an
identification system for the destination and recipient. There is no complex
documentation to be studied and the same has been maintained for years.
The pricing structure is standard--no matter the distance where the delivery
has to be made. This can be attributed to the fact that the dabbawalas walk,
cycle and use Mumbai's suburban trains, keeping the delivery costs very tightly
controlled. The delivery system revolves around strong teamwork and strict time
management which is depicted below. The meals are then delivered – 99.9999
per cent of the time to the right address.
The need to keep pace with the fast-evolving technology around the world has
led the dabbawalas to make use of mobile technology (SMS) for delivery purposes.
The organization expects to grow at the rate of 10-15 % every fiscal due to the
mobile technology usage. For the dabawallas their investment is a bare minimum
(bicycles, local trains , wooden crate for dabbas, white kurta pyjamas and the
Gandhi cap), their process highly standardized and very simple to understand and
by large the most important aspect, a highly dedicated and disciplined band of dabbawalas
where ownership and team work play a very critical role to ensure last mile
delivery.
As lean as it gets
The message for an enterprise of tomorrow (startup in particular) is loud and
clear : a highly standardized and simple process , right amount of investments
(???) , a highly dedicated and motivated workforce and the mantra that customer
is always the king could be a recipe for success, in other words a Lean Six Sigma Enterprise.
