What makes Mumbai's dabbawalas successful
(Mumbai's dabbawalas have…)
In last year's critically acclaimed movie The Lunchbox, there is a scene where the leading lady accuses her dabbawala of delivering the wrong dabba. The script could possibly have had the man respond by pointing out that the quality of Mumbai's 125 year old lunch delivery service has been studied by the likes of FedEx and Virgin Atlantic. Or the fact that that Prince Charles is a big admirer and invited them to his wedding.
Instead, writer-director Ritesh Batra has him quoting a Harvard Business School case study that says the dabbawala's error rate is one in six million deliveries. For Stefan Thomke, the author of the case, the affirmation of his work in popular culture was rather gratifying.
Mumbai's dabbawalas have been the subject of numerous TV documentaries, articles and books, but his was the very first academic study of the system. "It was a great movie and I was mentioned as this 'Harvard guy'. The Wall Street Journal called it a 'weird connection' and interviewed me about it," he says.
Written in 2010 and revised in 2013, The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time is a 23-page case that studies the Mumbai's lunch box delivery operation in detail and poses questions on how it might innovate with changing times.
Thomke, who has been a regular visitor to India since 1986 and is married to a person of Indian origin named Savita, has now expanded on the story with an article in Harvard Business Review titled Mumbai's Models of Service Excellence: What the city's dabbawalas can teach your company about quality.
"The question we ask is: how do you get extraordinary performance from average or even less-than-average people? It's a big question since most managers don't have the luxury of hiring stars — they have to work with what they have," he says.
The answer to the question, alas, is not simple, at least not simple enough to be compressed into one line. Thomke models the dabbawala system as working on the four pillars of organisation, management, process and culture and sees them as mutually reinforcing.
The 5,000 dabbawalas of Mumbai are organised into a flat structure of 200 self-managed teams of 25 individuals each, who vary in age from 18 to 65, with the most experienced ones acting as supervisors in addition to doing their own deliveries. Each dabbawala is an entrepreneur in his own right, responsible for negotiating prices with his own customers.
The operation is linked closely to the Mumbai railway system, which sets the pace and provides a scheduling mechanism. "Most service businesses don't have a built-in mechanism like the railways, but they can certainly adopt a system that confers similar benefits. For example, product development teams can set up a schedule in which they cycle repeatedly through the design-build-test process," says Thomke.
The most fascinating aspect of the dabbawala operation has always been its coding system. With a daily count of over 1.3 lakh lunch boxes, how do they ensure a box reaches the one it is meant for? Thomke believes it's the simplicity of the code that makes it work: a large bold number in the centre that indicates the neighborhood where the dabba is to be delivered; a bunch of characters on the edge of the lid denoting the office building, floor number and the dabbawala who will make the delivery. And finally, a combination of colour and motif for the railway station of origin.
"The dabbawalas, who run the same route for years, don't need any more cluttering details in the code. It's an insight that is applicable in many other industries, like the airline boarding passes. We operate in a visual world where less is more," says Thomke.
The fourth and most important pillar of the dabbawala system is its old fashioned culture of community — something most new-age corporates don't focus enough on. The men, and few women, who make up the dabbawala network trace their lineage to a clutch of villages around Pune and they share the same language, values, work ethic and religious beliefs.
They are highly motivated because they believe that delivering food to officegoers is like a service to God, not unlike delivering medicine to the sick. "This makes them very dedicated," says Thomke. "It's much more powerful mission statement than something like 'always delight the customer' or 'spread excellence'." The wide-spread publicity the dabbawalas have received over the past decade has resulted in several external agencies stepping in to experiment with their operation.
Microsoft and Hindustan Lever have tried distributing samples and flyers through the network but the dabbawalas found this to be so disruptive that it was abandoned after a trial run. Some business school students suggested they replace their bicycles with motorcycles but this too was debated and rejected as being unworkable. Then there was the idea of backward integration into catering, which was also rejected as being too far from the core competence of timely delivery.
Thomke uses the dabbawala case it in Executive Development Programs in conjunction with a case on the Toyota Production System and says, "When you compare the two, one of the takeaways is that both systems are extremely fine tuned. You can't change the smallest thing without affecting the whole system."
The only new scheme that has worked with the dabbawalas is an initiative to provide office goers with lunch sourced from catering establishments and not just homes. This is line with their core competence and the exploding trend of Mumbai's women joining the workplace. "The dabbawalas are facing challenges as their market undergoes a transformation," says Thomke. "But with judicious adjustments to their four pillars, they,may continue to achieve amazing results. That's a lesson mangers of all enterprises should take to heart."
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