More Reliable Than A Calculator: Mumbai's Six Sigma Delivery Institution
When you think of a logistics system with an accuracy of 99.99999375%, you probably imagine a group of intelligent, wealthy, corporate executives working in a large multinational company, as the mental machines behind this institution. Would you believe that the masterminds behind such a success, are 5000 working-class men, delivering over 200,000 tiffins (or lunchboxes) around a city of 20 million people?
The ‘Dabbawalas of Mumbai’ is an institution that has been serving the city of Mumbai since 1890. The order is as old as the city itself.
In the 1800s, Bombay was on the receiving end of an influx of migrants from all around the country, from Baluchistan in the West to Burma in the East, each seeking the financial opportunities the port of Bombay offered. Due to this influx of migrants, there was a larger demand for fast food and canteen services which were not prevalent as the city was still undergoing development. As a result, many of the city’s first settlers often had to go hungry for lunch. Since they belonged to different ethnic communities and had diverse cultural backgrounds, they too had their own established, nuanced tastes which could only be satisfied by their own home-cooked meals. In order to prevent these hard workers from laboring with an empty stomach, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started a lunch delivery service in Bombay with a hundred men, and the rest is history.
Today, this order of 5000 men dressed in humble, white cotton kurta-pyjamas, and a Gandhi Cap deliver 200,000 tiffins across the megacity in a matter of hours, never late or inaccurate for a pickup or delivery be it home-to-office or office-to-home, regardless of any obstacles that stand in their way. Be it the train crowds at Bandra station or the unforgiving Mumbai monsoon, they will settle for nothing less than perfection. It is this unbent mentality that will allow for no more than 1 error per 16 million transactions.
How can this uneducated and decentralized workforce operate so efficiently and flawlessly every day of the week, every week of the month, and every month of the year in an environment so unpredictable and challenging? In part it is due to the photographic understanding the Dabbawalas have of all the alleyways, all the avenues, all the roads, and all the boroughs of the metropolis. But the main reason is due to the intricate coding system painted on the lid of every single tiffin each Dabbawala delivers that is the backbone of this institution, allowing it to be recognized as a six sigma process (in which 99.99966% of all opportunities are statistically expected to be free of defects).
The tiffin coding system comprises of colors, numbers, and letters to indicate the collection point, train to be taken, and final destination of the tiffin. This information is conveyed through markings on the lid of the box. For example,
E: Hanuman Road (Code for Dabbawala street at the residential station/Tiffin’s origins)
VLP: Vile Parle (Residential train station)
9: Picked up by Dabbawala #9
3: at Churchgate train station
E: Delivered to Express Towers
12: 12th Floor
The management skills of Mumbai’s Dabbawalas are commendable to the point that there have been several research papers written about their logistics system and how they manage to achieve such unrivaled reliability. Typically, a Dabbawala must make 60-70 2-way transactions per day, catching trains which already run at short intervals. He must be precise with his timing, the Dabbawala must comply with the time of the customer, completing the delivery within the requested interval, therefore, not a second can go to waste. A delay of a few minutes can blunder the entire day’s schedule for multiple Dabbawalas. Hence, due to this interconnectedness, punctuality is a matter of life and death for every Dabbawala. The Dabbawalas believe that the formula to their success is punctuality + simplicity = accuracy. This comprehensive idea can be applied not only to business (hence the keen interest from famous entrepreneurs and figures), but also day to day life. As Leonardo DaVinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Writted by Uddish Garg, Student at UWCSEA East