The Six Sigma Magic — the story of the Dabbawala’s and their secret to success

Prologue:

Source:(1) Mumbai Dabbawala: Overview | LinkedIn

Aamchi Mumbai (our Mumbai) is a bustling and vibrant city of over 22 million people. Everybody is very busy with their day to day activities and constantly on the move, somewhere to be, something to do but the moment they see this person with a push cart or this person carrying a number of lunch boxes over their head, the busy crowd stops and gives way to the Dabbawalas.

Dabbawalas(Dabba = food box in this context and wala = person) have been in operation in Mumbai since the 1890s when one Parsee man started this trend by appointing a person to deliver him lunch everyday from home and thus started the revolution/evolution of this business. The person who was delivering the food Shri Mahadu Havaji Bachhe saw the business opportunity and need and launched the now Dabbawalla community. The Dabbawalas and their business has been extensively studied and published in multiple forums since. Today I want to dig a little deeper into the business model and tease apart the pros and cons from my vantage point, so let’s get right to it.

Topic Introduction:

The idea behind this service is very simple. A person collects home cooked meals from your home and delivers them to your place of work during lunch hours. The problem they are trying to solve is actually two fold: professionals do not have to carry lunch in the busy morning traffic while they are travelling by train and other public transportations and the people who are cooking at home do not have to have lunch ready that early in the morning.

The dabbawala’s work hours typically ranges from 10am in the morning to 5pm in the evening and would typically look something like this:

The Conceptual Framework:

The community of workers in this system are very close knit and have the mentality and motivation to help one another but strikes as the most fundamental reason for the prosperity of this business model is that this has been treated as a family run business so far and the baton passed from father to son for delivering delicious meals. In addition to the above, here are a few things that have been helping this framework succeed.

The numbering/coding system: They use Oil paint and codes to make sure that the boxes reach the right destination and are delivered back to the right home. Very simply the following represents who they code their boxes.

Note: This is one of the many representations and each area has a different numbering/coloring/coding systems but in essence all the areas will have the following information.

The Six Sigma Protocol: Very simply the six sigma is nothing but a method that organizations use to increase their profits and their efficiency by identifying shortcomings and fixing them. Six Sigma focuses on the following:

• Increase performance
• Increase profits
• Decrease process deviation
• Minimize defects and errors
• Improve quality of final products or services

The recent evaluation of the Dabbawalla’s delivery effectiveness has shown us that the make 1 mistake in every 1,60,00,000 deliveries which makes it a whooping 1 in 16 million error rate. Close to 99.999999 relatability for the service teams out there.

Intricate knowledge of the Mumbai railroads: They do not use any sophisticated transportation mechanism but have been using the public rail road system that Mumbai is so very well known for. They know the map of the railroad in the back of their heads and know the exact times when trains cross each other and where, this makes for an exciting visual as you will see a Dabbawalla handing tiffin boxes from one moving train to another with clear cut precision. Also this knowledge and time table information will help them stick to their schedule which is pretty tight. According to one of the sources of information they have 40 seconds to load the crates of dabbas onto a train at major stations and just 20 seconds at interim stops.

Every worker is a shareholder: They have a pretty flat hierarchical model of President -> Supervisor (Mukkudams) -> workers. The supervisor was also a worker once and 10 years of being a worker gets you a supervisor status and since you are one among them they know and respect you. Every supervisor is responsible for maintaining the standards and numbers for their section of delivery and pick up and as this is more decentralized you will see that the problems and other claims are sorted out more locally than being an all up problem. Every worker also contributes to this central fund for their local small group which will be used for the welfare of the dabbawalas and their daily needs e.g. if their bicycle is lost/broken then the money to replace and repair comes from this central fund.

The other side of the coin:

Advent of the nuclear families: With the current millennial and Gen -X population and the advent of nuclear families we see that many families have both the partners working and sharing responsibilities equally, that would mean you probably will have people taking their lunches with them or opting to eat at cafeterias or use the multitude of other food options that corporates are providing. This would in turn decrease the number of people opting to use the services of the dabbawalas and making this a dwindling business. The dabbawalas have launched something called the “Dabbawala central kitchen” to answer this question of survivability.

Dwindling workforce: Gone are the days when a son blindly followed in his father’s footsteps, people have started taking risks and have started to venture outside their comfort zones to try something new. In the past as I mentioned before the baton was passed from father to son in the dabbawala community but that might not be the case anymore and without the constant supply of workforce this might be a dwindling population.

Recent pandemic shift in working: The recent pandemic has changed the landscape for many businesses and this venture is no exception. With ~40% of the dabbawalas moving to their native villages during the pandemic and so many people having the option of working from home the number of people who might engage them in the future would be drastically different i.e. even if the workers who moved to villages come back to Mumbai in hopes to resuming their daily activities the number of families looking to hire these workers might not be as high as before.

The Nexus Beyond:

Many businesses have tried to copy the model of the Dabbawala and many have studied their working model but not many have been able to replicate this magic. Swiggy which is one of the newly launched food delivery apps in India has closely studied their model and seems to be doing a good job in learning many things from them for the digital world. Many grocery delivery apps also specialize in curating and delivering goods from the local stores but will they be as successful and as efficient as the Dabbawalas that is yet to be seen.