From the streets of Mumbai to global success: How the Dabbawalas achieved product-market fit and expanded their business.

In the early 1890s, a group of men dressed in traditional white outfits with Gandhi caps delivered home-cooked meals all around Mumbai. With a workforce of almost 5,000 people, they ensure that over 2 million people receive their lunch on time every day. Their seamless operation and outstanding delivery record, despite not having access to digital tools and technologies, have been attributed to their small initiatives, such as their?delivery process,?effective communication,?customer satisfaction, and?robust supply chain management.

How have they been able to run such operations?

How have they been able to start such a seamless operation in a time when digital technology was non-existent and continues to exist at this time when there have been numerous issues facing the food-delivery industry? Let’s take a closer look at why they have been so efficient and how they are Six Sigma compatible, (which means that the dabbawalas made less than 3.4 errors per million transactions).

The dabbawalas have a fantastic service delivery record, as they deliver more than 100,000 lunchboxes daily all over Mumbai; the fourth most populous city in the world. With almost 2,000,000 deliveries a week and fewer than 500 missing or delayed packages a year, and customers paying roughly $7 to $9 a month, you must be thinking, How can a poorly educated, decentralized team without access to digital tools and technologies perform with a very small margin of error in such a challenging environment?

The answer is a combination of small initiatives; ranging from their?delivery process?to?effective communication,?customer satisfaction, and?robust supply chain management. They have proved that with the right system and hardworking workers, any company can achieve extraordinary results consistently and product-market fit.

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How do the Dabbawalas work: Their Delivery Process

The Mumbai railway system sets the pace and rhythm of the daily works of the dabbawalas, their schedule determines when certain tasks need to be done and the amount of time allowed for each. The Dabbawalas run their food delivery business on four major pillars. These are?organization,?management,?culture, and?refined process. All of these are correctly aligned, and the dabbawalas have hinged their entire mode of operation on these pillars for several years, something uncommon in the corporate and tech worlds today.

Every morning, a Dabbawala picks up a food package from the customer’s home and goes to the nearest railway station. Then it is sorted and put on a cart heading to its destination; once the cart reaches the nearest station, the packages are sorted and assigned to another dabbawala who delivers to the destination before lunchtime. The success of this process hinges on avoiding confusion about who gets what package. The dabbawallas then came up with a coding system to label each package, indicating where it came from and where it should be delivered. This system has enabled them to reduce their margin of error to only misplacing or delaying packages less than 500 times out of a whopping 2,000,000 packages delivered.

Effective Communication

The dabbawalas have developed a simple coding system comprising of colors, numbers, and letters to indicate the collection point, train to be taken, and final destination of the package. This information is conveyed through markings on the lid of the box to avoid mistakes, delays, and/or package mixups. Beyond this, the dabbawalas operations also have a religious dimension, as these workers see themselves as carrying out God’s work. Coupled with the act of giving, this produces a profession that serves God through serving humanity.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is another critical component of the Dabbawalas’ operation. Each delivery agent is an entrepreneur who negotiates prices with individual customers. However, there are set guidelines for prices that take into account the distance between a customer’s residence and office and the distance between that office and the closest railway station. The Dabbawalas tend to work together with customers in the same location for years, and no other delivery agent is allowed to go after the same customer. The Dabbawalas take advantage of their relaxed schedule to interact with customers, share information about upcoming changes, collect monthly fees, and discuss other issues that could further improve the customer-dabbawala relationship.

Robust Supply Chain Management

Finally, the Dabbawalas’ robust supply chain management is vital to their success. Surprisingly, there are no information systems or digital technology on the supply chain side for the dabbawalas. Their effectiveness can be attributed to many things, including their rigorous level of practice over the years. While on the job, the dabbawalas wear the same style of clothes and white Gandhi caps, making them easy to identify. Even with the efficient coding system generated by the dabbawalas, the allocated time for picking up a package at a house is between 40 and 60 seconds, and any significant delay would easily cause a ripple effect that could potentially slow down several thousand deliveries. So to remain on schedule, every group has two or three extra delivery agents who could fill in wherever needed. Delivery agents with more than 10 years of experience go on to act as supervisors, and every group of delivery agents has one or more supervisors who ensure that coding, sorting, loading, and unloading packages go smoothly, as well as resolving disputes, troubleshooting, and overseeing collections. There are also monthly meetings among representatives elected by members to tackle operational and organizational issues.

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Through all of these, the dabbawallas have kept the business operational for several years and have grown from a few delivery agents to possessing one of the biggest delivery networks in the world. While the dabbawala network itself doesn’t appear to be in danger of disappearing, it might be forced to alter the nature of its business if it is to remain relevant. Rather than exclusively supplying home-cooked meals, they could be simultaneously forced and enticed by the prospect of higher wages to also work as contractors for the emerging food delivery businesses to meet the growing demand in the city.

Marriott Hotels takes a similar approach. About half of its employees are cross-trained, so front-desk agents, for example, can quickly help guests with their luggage if a bellhop isn’t available. The company claims that such cross-training enabled its Cancun hotel to return to business quickly after Hurricane Wilma swept through the region in 2005.