MBM 108

Critical Analysis of
Mumbai’s Models of
Service Excellence

BY: Stefan Thomke

Submitted By:

Vivek Yadav

117538
 Abstract
The case reports the research undertaken by the author to find the keys to the success
of the dabbawalas of Mumbai, India, comprising 5,000 self-managed, semi-literate
workers who work six days a week, to deliver up to 130,000 lunches from customers'
homes to their offices with great precision; negotiating the crowded city by train,
bicycle, and handcart, without the aid of any technology or even mobile phones.
Reveals that he uncovered a unique system with four pillars (organization,
management, process, culture), and proved that a business does not necessarily need
exceptional employees, advanced IT, or rigid controls to build a high-performance
organization since a flat structure, consisting of autonomous units of 25 people each,
is well suited to providing low-cost service, while the tight schedule of the train lines
over which meals are ferried regulates everyone's work. Concludes that the
dabbawalas show that with the right system, even ordinary workers can achieve
extraordinary results.
 Introduction
Stefan Thomke has addressed the life and strength of the organization which is the
first one in India to achieve six sigma standard of service excellence that too with
huge workforce of more than 5000 employees, who are mostly semiliterate. The
opening lines are structured and striking enough to attract any intellectual person to
get glued to the article and read it completely.
Question arises in the mind of readers from the initial paragraph like, how an
organization in India without employing students from so called IIMs and IITs can
achieve these remarkable figures that too without using even a communication device
like mobile? How these dabbawalas are able to achieve these high standards which
are generally achieved by airlines after implementing every high end technology and
the managers and employees of exceptional talent? Author has also pointed some
serious doubts to be settled in the later paragraphs like, how can a poorly educated,
decentralized workforce perform so beautifully in an environment that can charitably
be described as unpredictable and challenging? To critically analyse the article first
lets read out the article in brief. The summary of the article is given on next page.
 Summary
Mumbai’s dabbawalas is an association of mostly semi literate workers, who deliver
meals prepared in customers’ homes to their offices and then return the empty dabbas
(metal lunchboxes) the same day to home. These 5,000 or so dabbawalas in the city
have an astounding service record. Every working day they transport more than
130,000 lunchboxes throughout Mumbai, the world’s fourth-most-populous city. That
entails conducting upwards of 260,000 transactions in six hours each day, six days a
week, 52 weeks a year (minus holidays), but mistakes are extremely rare. Amazingly,
the dabbawalas—semiliterate workers who largely manage themselves—have
achieved that level of performance at very low cost, in an ecofriendly way, without
the use of any IT system or even cell phones.

It was founded in 1890. It has attracted world wide attention and visits by Prince
Charles, Richard Branson, and employees of Federal Express, a company renowned
for its own mastery of logistics.

How can a poorly educated, decentralized workforce perform so beautifully in an

environment that can charitably be described as unpredictable and challenging?
The answers hold lessons for a plethora of companies seeking to expand in emerging
markets but also for all developed economy enterprises whose ranks are dominated by
unexceptional talent. The dabbawalas have an overall system whose basic pillars i.e.:
 Organization,
 Management,
 Process, and
 Culture—are perfectly aligned and mutually reinforcing.

Organization: A Clockwork Design

A key to the dabbawalas’ operations is the Mumbai Suburban Railway, one of the
most extensive, complex, and heavily used urban commuter lines in the world. Its
basic layout allows delivery people with bicycles and handcarts to travel short
distances between the stations and customers’ homes and offices.
On any given day, a dabba changes hands several times. In the morning a worker
picks it up from the customer’s home and takes it (along with other dabbas) to the
nearest train station, where it is sorted and put onto a wooden crate according to its
destination. It is then taken by train to the station closest to its destination. There it is
sorted again and assigned to another worker, who delivers it to the right office before
lunchtime. In the afternoon the process runs in reverse, and the dabba is returned to
the customer’s home. The dabbawalas have organized themselves into roughly 200
units of about 25 people each. These small groups have local autonomy. Such a flat
organizational structure is perfectly suited to providing a low-cost delivery service.

Management: A Self- Organized Democracy

The dabbawalas essentially manage themselves with respect to hiring, logistics,
customer acquisition and retention, and conflict resolution. This helps them operate
efficiently and keep costs low and the quality of service high. All workers contribute
to a charitable trust that provides insurance and occasional financial aid—for
example, when a worker needs to replace a bicycle that’s been stolen or is broken
beyond repair.
Because dabbawalas own their relationships with customers and tend to work in the
same location for years, those relationships are generally long-term, trusting ones.
However, once the relationship is established, no other dabbawala is permitted to go
after the same customer and “steal” him. When someone wants to join a local
dabbawala group, the group will assess whether there’s enough demand to add
another person. After a probation period of six months, they can buy into the business
with a sum equal to 10 times their expected monthly income. Workers with more than
10 years of experience serve as supervisors, or muqaddams.

Process:Simplicity, Flexibility, and Rigor

For the dabbawalas, having the right process in place means more than simply
implementing efficient work flows. It also entails just about everything in the
organization, including the way information is managed, the use of built-in buffers,
and a strict adherence to standards.
Simple codes. To convey information, the dabbawalas rely on a system of very
basic symbols. The lid of a dabba has three key markings on it. The first marking
indicates the neighborhood where the dabba must be delivered. The second marking
indicates a number for the dabbawala who will make the delivery, an alphabetical
code for the office building, and a number indicating the floor. The third marking
indicates the station of origin.
Buffer capacity. To stay on schedule, each group has two or three extra workers
who fill in wherever they are needed, and all members are cross-trained in different
activities: collecting, sorting, transporting, finance, and customer relations. The
lesson: Especially in a highly variable environment, organizations can’t always run as
leanly as they might like. They need just enough extra capacity to handle problems
and emergencies but not so much that it bogs down the operation and becomes
wasteful overhead.
Rigorous adherence to processes and standards. This minimizes
variations that might throw a wrench into the works. The dabbas, for instance, are all
roughly the same size and cylindrical shape. The customers have to incur an
additional fee when their containers so large that they require special handling.
Unusual containers that interfere with the delivery operation are simply not accepted.
This uniformity allows a whole efficient procedure at every stage. The dabbawalas
strictly observe certain rules. For instance, they don’t eat until they have completed all
their deliveries. Workers are fined or fired for repeated mistakes and negligence.

Culture: A Strong Sense of Belonging

Mintzberg has included the mumbai dabbawala organization in his book for this
strong sense of community.
Emotional bonds and a shared identity. Dabbawalas, who range in age
from 18 to 65, tend to remain in their groups for their entire working lives. (There is
no mandatory retirement age.) As a result members of each team care deeply for one
another. New workers are typically friends or relatives of existing members, and
though Mumbai is a melting pot of religions, ethnicities, and dialects, most
dabbawalas have the same culture, language, values, work ethic, diet, and religious
beliefs. While on the job, the dabbawalas wear the same style of clothes and white
Gandhi caps, making them easy to identify.
There are advantages to uniformity: It creates a strong identity and sets boundaries
that are necessary in a highly variable environment.
A simple mission. Of course, corporations typically have much more
heterogeneous workforces. But they can learn from the dabbawalas’ devotion to their
simple mission: Delivering food on time, every time. For the dabbawalas, that task is
akin to delivering medicine to the sick, and serving food is like serving God.

Culture: A Self-Reinforcing System

The individual pillars help explain certain aspects of the success of the dabbawalas.
But to truly understand how they do what they do, you must look at the whole and
consider the ways in which the pillars reinforce one another. Take the coding system.
It is simple and visual, which allows a semiliterate workforce to sort dabbas quickly.
That allows the use of a hub-and spoke organization in which railway stations serve as
hubs and the need for centralized management is minimal. This is an important lesson
for executives who mistakenly think they can alter just one pillar without taking into
account the impact on the other three.
That's not to say that the dabbawalas oppose change. They acknowledge they must
adapt to major trends sweeping India, such as the exploding numbers of women
entering the workforce. Consequently, the dabbawalas have started to collaborate with
small companies and canteens that provide freshly prepared meals. They won’t allow
themselves to be distracted from their core mission of delivering dabbas on time.
Successful companies that have a strong central mission but find themselves in a
changing environment should take a similar path: They should articulate what their
core is, constantly experiment around it, and explore new opportunities but be careful
not to deviate too far. The dabbawalas have shown that with the right system, an
organization doesn’t need extraordinary talent to achieve extraordinary performance.
Leaders who see themselves as system architects can obtain the same results.
But getting organization, management, process, and culture aligned and self-
reinforcing is one thing; The dabbawalas, too, are facing challenges as their market
undergoes a transformation. But with judicious adjustments to their four pillars, they
may continue to achieve amazing results. And that’s a lesson managers of all
enterprises should take to heart.
Critique on Mumbai's Models of Service Excellence

Introduction
Stefan Thomke has addressed the life and strength of the organization which is the
first one in India to achieve six sigma standard of service excellence that too with
huge workforce of more than 5000 employees, who are mostly semiliterate. The
opening lines are structured and striking enough to attract any intellectual person to
get glued to the article and read it completely. Question arises in the mind of readers
from the initial paragraph like, how an organization in India without employing
students from so called IIMs and IITs can achieve these remarkable figures that too
without using even a communication device like mobile? How these dabbawalas are
able to achieve these high standards which are generally achieved by airlines after
implementing every high end technology and the managers and employees of
exceptional talent? Author has also pointed some serious doubts to be settled in the
later paragraphs like, how can a poorly educated, decentralized workforce perform so
beautifully in an environment that can charitably be described as unpredictable and
challenging?

Literature Review
The author has not relied basically on conventional literature for the purpose of
article. And that is justified, because the objective of the article is to find the factors
behind the success of the dabbawalas organization and not linking it with any kind of
theories and concepts. At some places the author has given citation to the news of
current scenario which indicates that the secondary data if used is basically
unconventional in the form of newspaper or magazines instead of books. So we can
judge that the author has basically not reviewed any books for the article. so in all the
research is primary data based research.

Research Methodology
S. Thomke has tried to give clear idea of the entire process of these dabbawalas and
also tried to explore the intimating cause behind their success. in all this is a
combination of exploratory and descriptive research. Author visited the organization
and passed time to understand the working and inherent rules and regulations
followed by these highly civilized groups of people. The sample considered for study
caters to all the level in this organization including the committee members,
supervisors or muqaddams, workers at various stages of process and the customers
also. The tools used to collect primary data are basically interviews both structured
and unstructured. Apart from this author has also used observation techniques to
understand the time management of this organization.

Nature of Data
Stefan Thomke has used basically primary data for the research collected from
basically interviews. The qualitative data has given preference over the quantitative
data. Thomke has given due consideration to the facts more than figures. Apart from
the number of workers and the daily transactions completed by them no significant
data is given in quantitative terms.

Overall Conclusion
Altogether author has done justice to the subject by giving the answers to the
questions aroused in my mind in the beginning of the article. The queries are settled
by giving the answer in terms of the four pillers.
Stefan Thomke describes the entrepreneurial spirit and legendary reliability of these
5,000+ dabbawalas. Thomke shares these facts in the initial paragraphs like the
dabbawalas are semiliterate workers who largely manage themselves, and yet have
achieved a high level of performance with almost no overhead, not complex IT
systems, and most without cell phones which altogether makes this article very
catchy. Thomke doesn't stop here and provide further acceleration to the article with
these lines:

“The dabbawalas service is legendary for its reliability. Since it was founded in 1890,
it has endured famines, wars, monsoons, Hindu-Muslim riots, and a series of terrorist
attacks. It has attracted worldwide attention and visits by Prince Charles, Richard
Branson, and employees of Federal Express, a company renowned for its own
mastery of logistics.”

Thomke traveled to Mumbai to learn all about the culture and history of the
dabbawalas, interviewed workers, supervisors, and observed them in action. The
outstanding factor in this article is the effort of author to provide the dabbawalas'
overall system consisting of 4 pillars, all of which are, as he puts it, “perfectly aligned
and mutually reinforcing.”

What stood out to me about this story was how much the dabbawala pillars matched
what experts have found to be true in the successful creation, and sustained health, of
communities – and specifically, communities built around social collaboration
infrastructures.

 Organization. Over the course of the day, a dabbas (a customer’s lunch box)
will change hands many times before it reaches its destination, and then is
returned back to where it started. There are clearly defined roles and
responsibilities, with everyone knowing their part, and what is expected of
them. Communities perform best when people know the organizational
structure (which doesn’t mean hierarchy, necessarily) and the roles they play
within, which allow them to participate more fully. (I often use the phrase “If
you don’t know the boundaries of what is expected, how do you know when
you’ve exceeded expectations?”)
 Management. The dabbawalas essentially manage themselves, but they
operate with a high level of trust and respect the customer boundaries (no
stealing customers) of their fellow dabbawalas. The community policies and
enforces rules and guidelines within the organization, which makes solving
disputes and reviewing exceptions quick and equitable. Similarly, most
communities work best when the organizational layout is clear, and the
members self-regulate, adapting and extending roles and rules, as needed.
 Process. One of the more interesting aspects of the dabbawalas system has
been their unique short-hand method for tracking origination and destination
locations, using numbers, colors, shapes, and simple alphabetic codes to keep
track of their clients. Thy adhere rigorously to their processes and standards,
because they rely so much on each other and the organization, and will fine or
fire members for repeated mistakes. But their process also empowers every
worker to take action to improve customer relations or to deal with issues at
any part of the supply chain. Similarly, communities thrive when processes are
kept relatively flat and transparent, allowing people to resolve their own issues
 rather than hand over the wall to a separate IT organization to resolve,
empowering people to do the right thing, and to keep the community healthy.
 Culture. Clearly, being part of the dabbawalas community is a lifestyle , with
workers sharing emotional bonds and connections, and many of them
spending their entire working lives within the dabbawalas ranks. New workers
generally come from friends or family members of the community, and share
the same cultural values, language, religious beliefs, and work ethics of the
people they work directly with – which is an important aspect of their
continued success. As with communities, the ability to identify and collaborate
with people who share beliefs and perspectives is an important ingredient to
the success of a community. Not that a community can’t be a melting pot of
backgrounds and beliefs – this has more to do with being able to surface a
shared sense of purpose.

Now, one important aspect of the dabbawalas success has been their need to make this
successful. Personally, I think this is above and beyond what the author described as
the group’s culture, because it has to do with people’s livelihoods -- they push to
succeed because they must succeed to survive. Aspects of that are parts of the
organizational culture, for sure, but I believe it has more to do with the individual
drive of its members – akin to those power users or connector personalities who drive
our collaborative structures and who hold our communities together. Without that
drive, the pillars will fall away.

As Thomke points out, there are some valuable lessons to be learned here. One
comment that stood out – and I completely agree with the author – is that a healthy
community is constantly reviewing each of these pillars and making adjustments. He
shares “When confronted with disappointing results, far too many companies
mistakenly think that the remedy is to conduct a purge of employees and recruit some
stars.” But the dubbawalas have shown that by allowing the community to adjust the
organization, management, organization, and culture of their community based on the
changes and economic realities of their surroundings, they can make the right
decisions to keep things moving forward. And since they’ve been around since 1890,
they’re obviously doing something right.