MUMBAI DABBAWALA’S
A dabbawala; also spelled as dabbawalla or dabbawallah; is a person in India India,, most commonly in Mumbai Mumbai,, who is part of a delivery system that collects hot food in lunch boxes from the residences of workers in the t he late morning, delivers the lunches to the workplace utilizing various modes of transport, predominantly bicycles predominantly bicycles and the railway trains, trains, and returns the empty boxes back to the customer's res idence that afternoon. They are also made use of by prominent meal suppliers in Mumbai where they ferry ready, cooked meals from central kitchens to the customers and back. In Mumbai Mumbai,, most office goers prefer to eat home cooked food rather than eat outside, usually for reasons of taste and hygiene, hence the concept. A number of work-from-home women also supply such home cooked meals, delivering through the dabbawala network .[1]
Contents [hide hide]]
1 Etymology 2 1890 - Beginning 3 Supply chain 3.1 Appearance and coding o 3.2 Uninterrupted services o 4 Economic analysis 5 Awards, Studies and recognition 5.1 Awards / Accreditations o 5.2 Studies and accolades o 5.3 Six Sigma myth o 6 World record 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links
MUMBAI DABBAWALA’S
A dabba, or Indian-style tiffin box.
Box coding The word "dabbawala" when literally translated, means "one who carries a box". "Dabba" means a box (usually a cylindrical tin or aluminium container), while "wala" is a suffix, denoting a doer or holder of the preceding word.[2] The closest meaning of the dabbawala in English would be the "lunch box delivery man".
1890 - Beginning[edit] In 1890, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started a lunch delivery service with about a hundred men.[3] In 1930, he informally attempted to unionize the dabbawallas. Later, a charitable trust was registered in 1956 under the name of Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust . The commercial arm of this trust was registered in 1968 as Mumbai Tiffin Box Supplier's Association. The current president of the association is Raghunath Medge.
Supply chain[edit] A collecting dabbawala, usually on bicycle, collects dabbas either f rom a worker's home or from the dabba makers. As many of the carriers are of limited literacy (the average literacy of
MUMBAI DABBAWALA’S Dabbawallahs is 8th grade[4]), the dabbas (boxes) have some sort of distinguishing mark on them, such as a colour or group of symbols. The dabbawala then takes them to a designated sorting place, where he and other collecting dabbawalas sort (and sometimes bundle) the lunch boxes into groups. The grouped boxes are put in the coaches of trains, with markings to identify the destination of the box (usually there is a designated car for the boxes). The markings include the railway station to unload the boxes and the destination building delivery address. At each station, boxes are handed over to a local dabbawala, who delivers them. The empty boxes are collected after lunch or the next day and sent back to the respective houses. Dabbawallas tend to belong to the Varkari sect of Maharashtra and consider Tukaram's teachings of helping each other to be central to their efficiency and motivation .[5]
Appearance and coding[edit] Lunch boxes are usually marked in several ways: (1) abbreviations for coll ection points, (2) colour code for starting station, (3) number for destination station and (4) markings for handling dabbawala at destination, building and fl oor .[6]
A typical dabbawala lunch.
It was estimated in 2007 that the dabbawala industry was still growing by 5-10% per annum.[7] The dabbawalas have started to embrace technology, and now allow for delivery requests through SMS.[8] A colour-coding system identifies the destination and recipient. Each dabbawala is required to contribute a minimum capital i n kind, in the form of two bicycles, a wooden crate for the tiffins, white cotton kurta- pyjamas, and the white Gandhi cap (topi). Each month there is a division of the earnings of each unit.
MUMBAI DABBAWALA’S Uninterrupted services[edit] The service is almost always uninterrupted, even on the days of severe weather such as monsoons. The local dabbawalas and population know each other well, and often form bonds of trust. Dabbawalas are generally well accustomed to the local areas they cater to, and use shortcuts and other low profile routes to deliver their goods on time. Occasionally, people communicate between home and work by putting messages inside the boxes; however, with the rise of instant communication such as SMS and instant messaging, this trend is vanishing. Since 1890, when the dabbawalas formally came into existence, none of them had ever gone on strike until 2011 when the members decided to head towards Azad Maidan to s upport Anna Hazare in his campaign against corruption.[9]
Economic analysis[edit] Each dabbawala, regardless of role, is paid about eight thousand rupees per month. Between 175,000 and 200,000 lunch boxes are moved by 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality. It is frequently claimed that dabbawalas make less than one mistake in every six million deliveries.[10] However, this error rate is conservative as it is estimated from Ragunath Medge, the president of the Mumbai Tiffinmen's Association in 1998, and is not from a rigorous study. Medge told Subrata Chakravarty, the lead author of the 'Fast Food' article b y Forbes.[11] that dabbawalas make a mistake "almost never, maybe once every two months" and this statement was extrapolated by Subrata Chakravarty to be a rate of "one mistake i n 8 million deliveries." [12] The ABC has produced a documentary on dabbawalas [13] and Prince Charles visited them during his visit to India; he had to fit in with thei r schedule, since their timing was too precise to permit any flexibility. Charles also invited them to his wedding with Camilla Parker Bowles in London on 9 April 2005. Owing to the tremendous publicity, some of the dabbawalas were invited to give guest lectures in some of the top business schools of India, which is very unusual. Most remarkably in the eyes of many Westerners, the success of the dabbawala trade has involved no advanced technology,[14] except for trains (and as mentioned above, SMS services for booking). The New York Times reported in 2007 that the 125-year-old dabbawala industry continues to grow at a rate of 5 – 10% per year .[7]
Awards, Studies and recognition[edit] Awards / Accreditations[edit]
ISO 9001:2000 certified by the Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand [15]
Studies and accolades[edit]
MUMBAI DABBAWALA’S
In 2001, Pawan G. Agrawal carried out his PhD research in " A Study & Logistics & Supply Chain Management of Dabbawala in Mumbai". He often presents his results on the efficiency of Dabbawallas in various fora.[16] In 2005, the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) featured a case s tudy on the Mumbai Dabbawallas from a management perspective of logistics.[17] In 2010, Harvard Business School added the case study The Dabbawala System: OnTime Delivery, Every Time to their compendium for its high level of service (equivalent of Six Sigma or better) with a low cost and simple operating system .[18]
Six Sigma myth[edit] It has been frequently asserted that dabbawalas were awarded a Six Sigma certification by Forbes magazine. This is a myth perpetuated by the news media who inferred the accreditation from the 1998 article in Forbes.[11] In 2007, an explanation was provided by the lead author of the article, Subrata Chakravarty in a private email correspondence to Gauri Sanjeev Pathak: " Forbes never certified the dabbawalas as being a six-sigma organization. In fact, I neve r used the term at all. As you know, six-sigma is a process, not a statistic. But i t is commonly associated with a statistic of 3.4 errors per million operations, and that is what caused the confusion … . I was impressed by the efficienc y and complexity of the process by which some 175,000 tiffin boxes were sorted, transported, delivered and returned each day by people who were mostly illiterate and unsophisticated. I asked the head of the organization how often they made a mistake. He said almost ne ver, maybe once every two months. Any more than that would be unforgivable to customers. I did the math, which works out to one mistake in 8 million deliveries — or 16 million, since the tiffin carriers are returned home each day. That is the statistic I used. Apparently, at a conference in 2002, a reporter asked the president … whether the tiffinwallahs were a six-sigma organization. He said he didn't know what that was. When told about the 3.4 error-per-million statistic, I'm told he said: "Then we are. Just ask Forbes". The reporter, obviously without having read my story, wrote that Forbes had certified the tiffinwallahs as a six-sigma organization. That phrase was picked up and repeated by other reporters in other stories and now seems to have become part of the folklore." — Subrata Chakravarty, [12]
World record[edit] On 21 March 2011, Prakash Baly Bachche carried three dabbawalla tiffin crates on his head at one time which was entered as a Guinness world record.[19]
References[edit] 1. Jump up ^ "In Pictures: Tiffin time in Mumbai". BBC news. 16 February 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2014. 2. Jump up ^ Pathak R.C. (1946, Reprint 2000). The Standard Dictionary of the Hindi Language, Varanasi: Bhargava Book Depot,pp.300,680
MUMBAI DABBAWALA’S 3. Jump up ^ "Bombay Dabbawalas go high-tech". Physorg.com. Retrieved 2011-09-15. 4. Jump up ^ Agrawal, Dr. Pawan. "Dabbawallahs - A talk by Dr. Pawan Agrawal". Ted X SSN Talks. You Tube. Retrieved 2 May 2014. 5. Jump up ^ Sinha, Vikram. "On the dot - a story by Vikram Sinha". Siemens - You Tube channel. Retrieved 2 May 2014. 6. Jump up ^ Mumbai's amazing Dabbawalas.Rediff.com (November 11, 2005). a b 7. ^ Jump up to: In India, Grandma Cooks, They Deliver from The New York Times 8. Jump up ^ BBC News: India's tiffinwalas fuel economy 9. Jump up ^ http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/dabbawalas-to-strike-for-thefirst-time-in-120-years/article2369850.ece 10. Jump up ^ The Guardian. A Bombay lunchbox (June 24, 2002). a b 11. ^ Jump up to: Chakravarty, Subrata N. "Fast food." Forbes. 10 Aug. 1998. Forbes Magazine. 21 Sept. 2013 http://www.forbes.com/global/1998/0810/0109078a.html. a b 12. ^ Jump up to: Pathak, Gauri Sanjeev. "Delivering the Nation: The Dabbawala s of Mumbai." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 33.2 (2010): 235-257. 13. Jump up ^ "Bombay Lunch Box". You Tube. Retrieved 2 May 2014. 14. Jump up ^ Amberish K Diwanji, "Dabbawallahs: Mumbai's best managed business", Rediff.com, November 4, 2003 15. Jump up ^ Mydabbawala.com: Accolades To Dabbawala 16. Jump up ^ "Dr. Pawan Agrawal". Kaizer. Retrieved 2 May 2014. 17. Jump up ^ Ravichandran, N. (1 September 2005). World class logistics operations : The case of Bombay dabbawallahs. Ahmedabad: Indian Institute of Management. 18. Jump up ^ The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time (Case 610-059). Harvard, Ma.: Harvard Business School. February 2010. 19. Jump up ^ "Most dabbawala tiffin crates carried on the hea". Guinness world records. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
Further reading[edit]
Shekhar Gupta, Our computer is our head and our Gandhi cap is the cover t o protect it from the sun or rain, Indian Express, Walk the Talk, NDTV 24x7. Hart, Jeremy (2006-03-19). "The Mumbai working lunch". The Independent Online (The Independent group, London). Retrieved 2007-03-20. "Indian lunchbox carriers to attend the Royal nuptials". Evening Standard (London) (Associated Newspapers Ltd). 2005-04-05. Retrieved 2007-03-20. Mumbai's Dabbawala: The Uncommon Story of the Common Man, Shobha Bondre. tr. Shalaka Walimbe. OMO Books, 2011. ISBN 81-910356-1-8. The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time, by Stefan H. Thomke and Mona Sinha, Harvard Business School Case Study, February 2010 (Revised January 2013)
External links[edit] Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dabbawalas .
Official website of Mumbai Dabbawala Association, Mumbai, India
Coordinates:
19°58′24″N 72°56′57″E19.97335°N 72.94922°E
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