Mumbai Dabbawallahs - Six Sigma Compliant

Mumbai Dabbawallahs - Critical Success factors

1. Faster Service: Assisted by high frequency of sub-urban trains. Well developed railway infrastructure and nominal fare charges.

2. Co-operation: The households need to be punctual in preparing lunch boxes, otherwise dabbawallahs proceed to another household.

3. Logistics network: Combination of milkman route, hub-to-hub transfer, hub-to-spoke transfer.

4. Codification system: Core to material flow and its tracking. Combination of alphabetics, colour and symbols.

5. Process Capability: Total time required from collection to delivery is 3 hrs. End to end travel time : 01:30 hrs, Travel time to nearest railway station - 30 min, sorting and material handling - 30 min, final despatch - 30 min. However, time available for delivery : 4 hrs. So customer satisfaction is met.

6. Transport economics: 
Public infrastructure(train) is used to deliver lunch boxes. This keeps the cost low, thus affordable price to customer. BDO assigns specific collection routes to individual members, whose responsibility is to collect lunch boxes and return empty ones.

7. Redundancy: There are more than one dabbawallahs knowing a particular route, so that they can easily fill in for absentees.

8. Structure: The structure is decentralised. It is a three tier structure with units - individuals, teams and groups. There are total 120 business units.

9. Compensation: It is same to every member irrespective of work load and responsibility.