Dabbawala shares secret of success

Forget about the coding system that Mumbai's dabbawalas use to transport lunch
boxes from homes to offices or the six-sigma and ISO certificates they have. The men
who ensure workers in India's financial capital get their food on time credit their
success to simple principles: stick to time and work is worship.
A conference of chartered accountants, which heard presentations on topics like wealth
structuring crisis, India's cost competitiveness, Middle East equity markets and
commodities cycle, was perked up by a presentation on Mumbai's ubiquitous
dabbawalas.
The men who transport lunch boxes have been a subject of study for management
gurus like C.K. Prahalad and schools like Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and
those in the American Ivy League.
Invited by the Dubai chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Manish
Tripathi, honorary director of Mumbai's dabbawalas, gave a presentation on the trade
wearing a now globally recognizable dabbawala white cap and swearing with his hand
on a tiffin box that he would say the truth and nothing but truth about his trade.
Believe me, I will give you so much knowledge about dabbawalas that any of you can
come to Mumbai and start working as a dabbawala, he told an over-1,000 strong
audience at a five start hotel here.
Our work revolves around a few beliefs - the most important ones of which are
sticking to time and believing that work is worship, he said.
Annadan is mahadan (giving food is the greatest charity). We dabbawalas have a
strong belief in god. But you don't see god, do you? So, whom do you worship? People
- after all, they are creations of god. You worship god by ensuring that people get to
eat their food on time, he said while making the PowerPoint presentation that was
prepared for the dabbawalas by an IIM student.
Time, Tripathi said, is the first thing any dabbawala has to stick to if he has to
succeed in the trade.

He explained how every dabbawala believed that he was a descendant of great Maratha
leader Shivaji and came from the same community.
Our forefathers fought under Shivaji against powerful enemies. Today, we wage our
war against time, he said, adding that this is what ensures that an office-goer in
Mumbai gets his or her homemade food for lunch precisely at 12:30 p.m. every
working day of the week.
There are around 5,000 dabbawalas in Mumbai today delivering around 200,000 tiffinboxes amounting to 400,000 transactions every day - first delivering the tiffin boxes
and then delivering the empty boxes back home.
Every dabbawala has to report for duty at their designated locations at precisely 9:30
a.m.
From then on, their work starts. For three hours - We call this war time - the
dabbawalas work in a high pressure environment in traffic-congested Mumbai as they
move dabbas on foot, carts and local trains to deliver the food to their customers
across various places in India's commercial capital.
We ensure that all our customers too stick to time. A dabbawala waits at a household
to collect a dabba for half-a-minute to two minutes and not more. A housewife may
delay in handing over a dabba for a day or two and not more than that, he said.
After all, her delaying one dabba will mean delaying thousands of dabbas across the
system, which means thousands of people will not get their food on time, he said.
On the other end, if the office worker cannot have his lunch on time, then he has to
keep two dabbas so that our dabbawala can bring back the previous day's empty
dabba. That usually happens with a new employee when the boss loads them with so
much work that they don't have time for lunch, he said amid resounding laughter.
For three hours, the dabbawalas work on war footing to cover around 60-70 km so that
their customers get their lunch on time.
Red lights, traffic jams, pedestrian crossings cannot stop us. Even policemen in
Mumbai let us go when they see our trademark white cap, he said.
So what is the motivating factor for the dabbawalas?
Every dabbawala is a stakeholder in the system. That is the single most motivating
factor. Nobody is an employee. Which is why there has not been a single record of
strike in our business, he said.

This is what goes into the dabbawalas' supply chain management - much studied by
management gurus and schools - which has ensured a now globally renowned error
rate of one in 16 million transactions.
That and the coding system are the factors for the success of their supply chain
management.
We cannot afford to have a mistake. Imagine what trust people will have on our
services if a customer having orthodox vegetarian Jain food gets someone else's
chicken curry! Tripathi said.
As for the educational qualifications of the dabbawalas, Tripathi put his thumb up to
mean most are illiterate. "Maybe 15 percent of us reach Class 8. More than that and we
will start having problems. Educated people have many questions - why, how - which
can act as hindrances in our strictly time-based trade, he said, adding that disputes
within dabbawalas, if any, were resolved on the spot.
Our workers just have the basic knowledge of alphabets and numerals which help
them write the codes on the tiffin boxes.
Explaining the major features of the dabbawalas's supply chain management, Tripathi,
who had given similar presentations at IIMs, Stanford University and George
Washington State University among others, said: Zero percent reliance on fuel, zero
percent use of modern technology, zero percent investment, zero percent disputes,
99.99 percent performance rate and 100 percent customer satisfaction.
On the question of whether the opening of multinational fast food chains in Mumbai
was a threat to dabbawalas, he said: As long as there is a husband who loves his wife
and his homemade food, we will be there.

More Information can be read in the website : http://www.mydabbawala.com/