The Six Sigma Story: Mumbai Dabbawalas in 2024

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Sigma is a Greek letter used in mathematics to represent the standard deviation. Six Sigma definitely sounds Greek to you but the story goes beyond Greece.

Six Sigma is a set of technique and tools to improve the process. It seeks to improve the quality of the process by identifying and removing the causes of defects or expected defects leading to failure in the final outcome. A Six Sigma is process were 99.99966% of all opportunities of producing defects are statistically measured and controlled upon.

Six Sigma Story started at Motorola, a telecommunication company, by an American engineer Bill Smith, to measure and control defects to improve overall quality.

The ultimate objective of implementing Six Sigma in any organization is to –

• Increase performance
• Increase profits
• Decrease process deviation
• Minimize defects and errors
• Improve quality of final products or services.

In general, the term Six Sigma quality is measured in bell shaped curve graph. It follows a process limits ±3s from the center line in a control chart, and extends to the requirements or tolerance limits ±6s from the center line. As you may see below is a standards six sigma normal distributed curve indicating mean, standards deviation and defects to indicate the final six sigma quality of the process.

Success of Six Sigma implementation is based upon following principles:

• Focus on customer’s requirements and increase customer ‘s satisfaction
• To do error-less statistical analysis to understand improvement opportunities.
• Efficiently eliminate variation to lower the defects
• Involving manpower to build teamwork.
• Reducing Costs
• Increase Profitability
• Uses well-trained, independent teams to handle well-defined projects
• Uses independent teams and worker participation pioneered by the Japanese with quality circles and the gemba methodology.

What are the main concepts in Six Sigma?

• DPMO (Defects Per Million Opportunities)

• Critical to Quality:

Critical to quality means the measurable characteristics of a product or service which must be matches the customer requirement of product or service.

• Defect:

The defect is defined as a product or service characteristics which are rejected by customers

• Process Capability:

It means to to deliver or produce a service or product which is meeting the customer demands.

• Variation:

In a Six Sigma story, variation means  mearusing of difference between the final product or service delivered to the customer visa-vis expectation of the customer.

• Stable Operations:

Stable operations means to ensure that the process of business makes consistent efforts to reduce the gap between what customer sees and feels.

Some of the additional features that set Six Sigma story apart from previous quality-improvement initiatives are –

• Focus on maintaining a quantifiable and measurable financial return from a Six Sigma project.
• Emphasis to be increased on strong management leadership and support the cause.
• Most importantly commitment to make decisions on the basis of verifiable data and statistical methods, rather than assumptions and guesswork.

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The Mumbai Dabbawalas

Mumbai never sleeps!! Mumbai never stops!!

Mumbai, an archipelago at one time, is now connected to be the one of the most populous city of India. It is stretched for about 603 square kilometer running on one track from Andheri to Kurla

Along with Mumbai, an army of Mumbai also never stops. An army of around 5000 people dressed in white dhoti or payjama, white kurta and a white Gandhi topi moving all day long on the roads to assist lakhs of people to enjoy fresh and healthy homemade food. This saves there time as well as money.

Yes. You guessed it right. I am talking of the famous Mumbai Dabbawalas!! There is system of providing Tiffin services to lakhs of offices in Mumbai.

This battalion has been serving people of Mumbai since more than 125 years. With an impressive style of work management and dauntless work ethics they supply launch boxes for almost 2 lakhs working professionals in one of the busiest city of India – Mumbai. They pick up launch boxes from the house in morning, drop them to offices and drop the lunch boxes back to the house before evening.

The Golden status of a Mumbai dabbawala at Haji Ali station will make you to stand still and force you to think upon and  re-learn all your management lessons. The journey started way back in 1890 when Shri Mahadu Havaji Bachhe started to pick and drop tiffin box for a parsee banker.He saw the business and service opportunity of tiffin service in the locality. He started the lunch delivery service and from one man, one customer, with one dabba it increased to 100 dabbas.

The history of Mumbai dabbawals go hand in hand with historical and geographical development of Mumbai city.

They are the Maratha of Varkari sect of interior village in Maharashtra. They are ancestors of legendry warrior Chatrapati Shivaji. Staff lives a simple life. They are pure vegetarian and worshiper of lord Vithaldev of Mumbai. They find happiness in simplicity. As a Varkari clan service is in their DNA and they consider work is worship.

How can a semi-literate,  decentralized workforce perform so exemplarily in constantly changing environment that can be described as unpredictable and challenging?

The concept — “Mumbai Dabbawalas”

 

The average travel time of working professionals in Mumbai is 3 hours. They leave as early as 8 am in the morning and return never before 8 in the evening. The mornings of a mumbaikers are generally deprived of breakfast. In Mumbai you cannot carry your own tiffin box of over-crowded local trains and the distance to be travelled. This is when the Mumbai dabbawalas come into picture.

They help people enjoy the availability of home cooked food being picked and delivered to offices before launch time. Even with dawn of muddy monsoon, submerging the city to waist level, not even a single dabba gets delayed.

Culture and Ethics

Resilience, strength and ingenious are so symbolic to Mumbai dabbawalas.

Belonging to the warrior ancestral, they believe that being a part of dabbawala they are actually nurturing Marathi culture, a culture of goodwill and oneness. They carry their believe system at work:

* Work is worship
* serving people is serving God
* time is money
* unity is power

Average age of a Mumbai dabbawala ranges from 18 years to 65 years. There is no official retirement age. Most of them have the same culture, language, values, work ethic, diet, and religious beliefs.

The concept of uniformity plays an important part in the sustenance of the organization.

One Mission – One Vision

“Spread Excellence Everywhere and Always Delight the Customer”

Unlike the corporate this organization has a very powerful  and straight forward mission which is well aliened with the goal the organization on the basis of which each worker are measured on daily basis.

The food dabbas that they carry has a shelf life of 4 -5 hours. The total delivery time is 6 hours – 3 hours from house to office and 3 hours from office to house.

Each box shifts hands in transit 6 times and same in return as an empty tiffin. 2.4 million manual movement in transit. Four hundred thousand end customers. On daily basis one worker covers a distance of 60 – 70 km.

Speed and precision handling the boxes, timely delivery to the right owner helps them maintain their service quality.

Dabbawala minus discipline ‘is zero’

All workers must wear their white cap in business hours making them easy to identify, adhere to duty reporting times, respect their customers and must carry their identification cards.

They operate in a group of 20 – 30 people. Each dabbawala is responsible for 30 – 40 tiffin boxes for collection and distribution, all through the three major suburban rail routes.

Their journey starts from morning 9 am. Any leaves are to be prior informed so as back is arranged well in time to not obstruct the system. The workforce has not gone on strike since inception.

Staffs do not spend any extravagant life. They live a simple life. They do not indulge into any bad habits like drinking, smoking and tobacco consumption. They not just monitor their staff discipline but also monitor their customer discipline. If a customer delays in giving the dabba three times, they stop serving them. They abandon bad customer.

Being disciplined, help them to become planned and focused which creates an environment of concentration on work to uplift their productivity. It may look like a chaotic situation but instead discipline is the only factor which helps them synchronize even in tight schedule.

Keep it simple – Management Lesson

There is no chance that a dabbawala would make a mistake. Even in harsh weather conditions or circumstances, we deliver a home-cooked meal on time. They beat out all such practical hindrances like – unpunctual customers, long physical distances, large number of dabbas, Mumbai Traffic, Crowded trains, network co-ordination, multiple hand shifts, scattered pick up and drop off destinations.

It never happens that a Parsi chicken curry gets mixed up with Jain dal-roti.

In this era of wifi and high end technology, the organization till date believe in their simplicity All the tiffins are picked and carried in bicycle, hand cart and local train. Except the local train every step is handled manually and no technology is involved.

They stay true to their purpose and have one point focus which is service to mankind. They promote community living and thus have inbuilt qualities of a good team work.

Full of passion and value they believe in building trust in their customer’s heart. TRUST that travels from one pick up point to destination point. This is the most uncommon and difficult synergy that a manager strives for in this corporate world.

Each and every single step of their process involves some management lessons and still they work on only four basic pillars – organization, management, process and culture. All of them are so perfectly and mutually aligned so as to maximize productivity and creativity.

A Flat Organizational Structure

An employee who gets 10 years of experience as dabbawala is appointed as mukadams – supervisors to the members

They follow a three layer organizational structure – the President, the Mukadams and the Members. Organization follows no complex hierarchy or managerial structure which not only reduces operational costs but also empower-s employees to perform at their best.

The so called “decentralized organizational structure” provides a flexible work environment at all levels.

Logistics is happening for 2,60,000 transaction in six hours a day, six days a week,52 weeks a year; but rarely any mistakes. Supply chain managment,Logistics managemnt, customer satisfaction, hiring new workforce and dispute resolution are all managed by dabbawals themselves.

A Jargon

Average literacy standards of a traditional dabbawala don’t go beyond grade 8 thither are largely uneducated and probably only 15 % might have attended to senior secondary school. They don’t know what is six sigma, what is the meaning of six sigma and how and why of six sigma.

The question arises how they nailed this Six Sigma Story ?

In an interview the workers said “error is horror” we don’t want to think of it. They added that we don’t work for six sigma, we work for customer satisfaction.

They work with the motto – “Customer is King”

Dabbawala got Six Sigma Certified, which means, error ratio is 1 in 16 million i.e. 1 mistake in 1,60,00,000 tiffin. In 1998, Forbes Global magazine, conducted quality assurance study on operation of dabbawala and gave a six sigma efficiency rating of 99.999999.

Mumbai Dabbawalas are ISO 9001:2000 certified by the Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand. They have shown an exemplary performance in servicing customers.

Intelligent coding system and use of bicycle, hand pulled cart as well as local train is what remarks the successful journey of an efficient time management to fall in line with six sigma quality service standards by the Mumbai Dabbawalas.

99.9999% performance and 100 percent customer satisfaction. This means the margin of error in their work is less than 0.1%.

It is so hard to demarcate between the Six Sigma Story and Mumbai Dabbawalas story.

The tour of accuracy and time management starts from the pickup point at 9.30 a.m. form the residence. In next step, they bring the boxes to the nearest common location where the tiffins are shuffled as per travel route and destination station. The wooden crate loaded with tiiffin boxes is then loaded in the goods compartment of the local train preferably the last compartment to avoid chaotic situation. Unloading takes place at the destination station.Re-shuffleing of tiffins again takes place as per the destination area and destination building. For distribution purpose hand pulled wooden cart is used which can carry around 150 tiffins and is driven by 3-4 dabbawals.

Amazingly, all dabbas gets distributed and delivered between 11:00 p.m. to 12:p.m… Which means them delivery tiffin from one corner of Mumbai to another in a time span of just 2 – 3 hours? By virtue of their cultural values, dabbawals never break for launch till all boxes get delivered to destination.

From 01:30 p.m. the collection process begins. Dabbawalas pick the tiffins from the offices where they had delivered an hour before. Each dabba travel through the same route before being returned to the original residence. By 4:00 p.m. the group again meets at the original station where the final sorting and dispatching happens. Finally tiffin boxes reaches to their original owner. Mumbai Dabbawals do this exemplary work without any error.

Cracking the Dabba Code

If you a pick a dabba from the wooden caret of a dabbawala, you can see on the lid of the dabba, there are some alpha-numeric codes written or painted in different colours.

From the days of inception, when the dabbas increased it became difficult to remember all address of offices and houses for all dabbawalas. With the low level of education standards it made it all the more difficult to set the process in place.

They evolved with the colour coding system. Very initially only different colors were used to denote the locations. With increase in business and client base, they introduced the alpha numeric coding system with different colors. They started to use symbols, which were explained to each worker as a part of training. Now a days Mumbai Dabbawalas make code using numbers, alphabets in Hindi, English and Marathi also.

This intelligent coding system helps them to drop and deliver the tiffin boxes at the correct location without even referring a list or maintaining a database with them.

The coding system includes following major definition in code-word:–

• Code for house address for pick up or drop of tiffin
• Code of office address to be delivered, where even the floor of the office is mentioned
• Code of the destination rail route
• Code for the route to which the tiffin will be carried.
• Code for the which dabbawala will carry the transit work
• Symbols and signs are used for identifying station of origin and delivery

This super innovative coding system uses the concept of re-engineering and re-designing to attain the six sigma mark. They keep transforming the coding system as per the expansion of geographical coverage of client base and also with the increasing number of client which keep adding every day. With the development of city structure and increase in client base supply chain makes necessary changes to expand the dabbawala system. Color coding system is the key contributing factors for Mumbai dabbawalas 99.99 % work efficiency rate.

Stick to basics

The total business runs in an eco friendly mode. They have zero fuel, zero modern technology, zero investment, and zero disputes. Even after lots of suggestions from big corporate they simply turned them done stating they are better off with the basics. They use bicycle and hand-pulled wooden cart. This eases their business in many ways –

• They don’t have to stuck and wait in city’s traffic
• No fuel expenses by using modern vehicle.
• No expenses in training staff to run the vehicle
• Low cost of maintenance

The organization runs with a remarkable approach to mitigate practical problems. They aim at sharpening their most important tool to ensure negligible defects with increased accuracy and efficiency in service.

They use age old strategy of marketing. They do not flash any contact number nor do they adopt any modern or technical means of marketing in order to acquire new customers. Once an organization tried to help in advertisement, dabbawalas tried to follow. But sooner they surrendered and said that it’s a waste of time and if one customer like their work automatically more customers will add on.

No Extraordinary talent for an Extraordinary Performance

The Mumbai Dabbawalas have taught many big corporate that – organization do not need extraordinary talents to achieve extraordinary performance rather they need to reinforce right system. With the flat organizational structure, they have proved that complexity in system will only lead the organization to default in compliance.

With the humanistic approach, they have laid a trend of not hiring highly educated work force and so no high salary structure. Employee satisfaction here is not monetary rather they have strong service commitments.

So for the big brothers around, it’s the commitment that matters and not the qualification.

As is so true in today’s practical world, higher pay package cannot retain employee at least not for long term.

One of the most important decision of the organization was to focus on their core job their core competency and do not let any other kind of activities distract them. The thumb rule of the organization is to minimize the operational cost and maximize their working with minimal capital utilization.

The training strategy of old guys teaching the new entrants and sharing their experience provides a holistic picture to working environment and circumstances.

Since this job is voluntarily chosen by them, the love and dedication for the job never goes missing. When they receive appreciation it becomes their status and pride.

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