Each day throughout the city of
Mumbai, India, 5000 individuals called dabbawalas deliver
some 130,000 dabbas (lunchboxes filled with home-cooked food) to offices
throughout the metropolis. In the nearly 120 years of this service, Mumbai has
changed enormously, becoming, India’s financial and commercial capital, housing
some 10.5 million people. Yet the dabbawalas’ approach had remained consistent:
a semi-literate work force (the dabbawalas) picked up the filled dabbas from the households that prepared
them and delivered the boxes to the requisite offices; they then retrieved the
empty dabbas from these delivery
points and returned them to the originating households, in order to begin the
process again the next day.
This case study describes the Mumbai-based Dabbawala
organization, which achieves very high service performance (6 Sigma equivalent
or better) with a low-cost and very simple operating system. The case explores
all aspects of their system (mission, information management, material flows,
human resource system, processes, etc.) and the challenges that the Dabbawala
organization faces in a rapidly changing environment.
A Brief History
It all started because in 1885, a
banker in Mumbai really loved his wife. The banker had to work far from home
and so could not return home to eat the lunch prepared by his wife. He decided
instead to hire a man to pick up the packed lunch from his home and have it
delivered to his office. Others started imitating him. Then one day, Mahadev
Haji Bache, a farmer from Pune, saw an opportunity and created a delivery
business- this is how the Dabbawalas system was started.
Motivation:
In recent years, the dabbawala
system began to generate worldwide news, attracting the attention of royalty
like Britain’s Prince Charles, famous industrialists like Sir Richard Branson
of the Virgin Group, and of executives from sophisticated delivery companies
like FedEx. It motivated a plethora of books, TV documentaries, and articles.
People interested in how the system worked trooped to Mumbai to chronicle the
dabbawalas in action celebrating more than “supply chain efficiency”. The error
rate of dabawallas is about 1 in 16 million.They believe in work is workship
and their motto is 100% customer satisfaction.
This inspired us to study the
Dabbawals of Mumbai.
Management
Lessons learnt from the Mumbai Dabbawalas:
1
Build your organisation around people:
2
Commitment and attitude trump qualifications - Educate
employees about the importance of what they do.Once they know they will make
sure that errors are minimized and even in the absence of a code of conduct they will strive to
deliver better results for their customers – internal or external.
3
Give employees a sense of purpose -
4
Stay true to your core purpose
5
Recruit carefully
6
Don’t be too lean, build in buffers
7
Encourage self discipline - It is important to promote self discipline rather than discipline among your
employees and don’t be shy when it comes to penalizing wayward behavior. Bad
behavior gets imbibed faster remember no
one taught you smoking but you picked it up just by looking at your friends.
8
Create a sense of ownership
9
Maintain a flat organisation - Various Hierarchies in the organisation can boost egos not the
business.Let your people take their own decisions as far as possible.
10 Abandon
bad customers - hard
to admit but a reality of life.If you have bunch of bad customers who bring
down your efficiency, dump bad customers before the good ones dump you.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
- simplicity with innovative service
- coordination, team spirit
- Customer satisfaction
- Low Cost
Weakness
- Depend on local trains
- Funds left for the organisation is very less.
- Caste-based
- Customer satisfaction
- Low Cost
Oppurtunities
- Low operational cost
- Publicity
Threats
- Direct competition from other caterers
- Indirect competition from other food joints.
- Office canteens
The
Problem:
The problem with the Mumbai
dabbawals is their aversion towards
technology. They have an
English-language website which has
successfully garnered media, corporate and academic interest, leading to
speaking assignments and attracting small donations. But the site had not substantially increased the
delivery service’s customer base because the inquiries received were passed
on informally by word-of-mouth and there was no system in place to monitor
whether an inquiry reached the appropriate dabbawalas and whether conversion to
sales materialized. The “technology aversion” among most dabbawalas has
compounded their challenges. A more cutting-edge approach to technology could
help overcome the current limitations, but the organization is sceptical.
These could be summed up by a
comment by the leader of the Dabbawalas recently made: “What can technology do
when we don’t have even regular electricity supply? We are not educated so we
don’t know how to use technology. Our philosophy is that serving food is like
serving God. We should just focus on delivering dabbas.”
As mentioned earlier,
the dabbawalas have very low error rate (about 1 in 16 million). Their delivery
system was operational even during the floods/rain. One serious problem that
the MTBS Association is facing is that the employees (dabbawalas) are quiting the organisation and opting for other
empolyement means like taxi driving etc. This is mainly because of the low
salary they are paid(about 3000-5000). Also the organisation is very particular
about the employees they recruit.
Proposed Solution:
To improve and develop
the Dabbawala system, we propose the following changes in the organization.
1) Change Of Management
Attitude
Management's attitude
plays a huge role in employee motivation, over a period of time this translates
into the culture of any organization.
This has been the case with the Mumbai Dabbawalas as well. The top
management of the Dabbawalas are reluctant to changes and has been traditional
in its approach. This has hindered the growth of the organization into higher
scales. At this juncture where the Dabbawalas have carved a niche for
themselves in Mumbai as one of the most innovative service providers, the
change management in the organization plays an important role.
The important changes
that are required in the organization are
1
Strategic changes
2
Technological changes
In terms of strategy,
the problem has been that the organization has always under valued its true
potential. The organization can expand its operations to other metropolins in
India because the working class still prefers home cooked food.
Technological Changes
The aversion towards
technology has been one of the reasons for Dabbawalas for not having grown in
the scale as expected. They have
an English-language website which has successfully garnered media, corporate
and academic interest, leading to speaking assignments and attracting small
donations. But the site had not substantially increased the delivery service’s
customer base because the inquiries received were passed on informally by
word-of-mouth and there was no system in place to monitor whether an inquiry
reached the appropriate dabbawalas and whether conversion to sales
materialized.
The Dabbawalas can
encourage people to register online if they wish to use the dabbawala service.
Such a step would increase their customer base and the employees may get more salary.
The organisation can
introduce what is called as the SMS Updates system using many websites like www.Way2sms.com. Thus give the hungry customers, live updates of
their tiffin/dabbas
Employee retention
Another major problem that the organization is facing is
that many of the Dabbawalas are quitting their jobs for other jobs which pay
more. Hence employee retention strategies are a key for the growth of this
organization. Lessons have to be learnt from Organizational Behaviour
concepts. The Employer must create a
"win-win" situation. Valance
and expectancy theories should be used as a guide to retain the employees.
Retention has a direct
and causal relationship with employee needs and motivation. Applying a
motivation theory model, such as Maslow’s
Hierarchy of Needs, is an effective way of identifying effective retention
protocol.
