DJ Trava

Posts Tagged ‘traffic’

The Mumbai Dabbawallas deliver food to workplaces, homes and hotels in Mumbai , plus they do it all day long. There’s no high technology involved, no intricate process is necessary and no structure. The Dabbawallas were even studied by Harvard University and were called or renown for being a six sigma organization, which means they have less defects per million sales, implying that out of every million lunches delivered from their home to their destinations, offices, homes, hotel rooms, etc., at the most, three could miss reaching the right desk, home or room at the right time. That’s pretty impressive.

When dealing with lunch, lets say, it needs to be understood that they must reach before lunch time, and Mumbai traffic, weather or anything else that might arise will not be an acceptable excuse for any delay whatsoever. I’m not sure why more companies don’t emulate the Mumbai Dabbawallas for their service and reliability. Plus, they don’t advertise, they color code the lunch boxes to ensure the information necessary for a successful delivery can be understood by illiterate people, all Dabbawallas are shareholders, and a majority of them are senior employees, but there is no hierarchy. Each Dabbawalla only gets to do 35 deliveries. They have not been on strike and all of them come from a single sect from a remote villages from around Mumbai.

There’s a lot more efficiencies, but I think you get the point. It’s a well run organization, which seem to have the appearance that it could be a complete disaster, but has been in existence for well over hundreds of years. This is interesting: one huge shipping company from Europe actually came to study this process. They travelled in the local train from Virar to Churchgate station in order to experience the Dabbawallas in action. In doing so, they finally had to ask themselves, how is it with all the technology at our disposal do we lose so many shipments, but here in Mumbai, with virtually no technology, the Dabbawallas have achieved a six-sigma status?