Registered in 1956
Total area coverage : 60 Kms to 70 Kms
Employee Strength : 5000
Size of busines : 2,00,000 units or
i.e 4,00,000 transactions every day.
Time taken : 3 hrs
Error Rate : 1 in 16 million transactions
Six Sigma performance (99.999999)
Technological Backup : Nil.
Standard price for all (Weight, Distance, Space)
Rs. 18 Cr. Turnover approx.
“No strike” record as each one a share holder
No we not talking abt a Fed ex or Dell or the Indian Post for that matter.
Its the
Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association
or the dabba wallahs .. as we commonly know them !!!
Omega the Operations & Statistics Interest group at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, through OPUS 2006 played host to Mr. Raghunath Megde (President) and Mr. Gangaram Talekar (Secretary) and Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (The Mumbai Dabbawallahs).
Read on ...
Delivering meals might not sound so cutting edge, but the runners, officially called "dabbawallahs," are somewhat of a phenomenon among management gurus in the know. Using a hugely complicated combination of color and symbol coding -- most of the runners are illterate -- and precision timing, around 5,000 dabbawallahs pick up more than 170,000 lunches from the suburbs every working day and deliver them to offices, as well as schools and colleges.
This is still more amazing given that lunches can changes hands three or four times over the course of each journey. They are collected from homes in the early morning and taken onto the suburban rail system, where they are sorted out for delivery using a system of colours, dashes and crosses on the lid to denote suburb, street, building and floor.
For the efficiency of their supply chain it has been claimed that this virtually achieves a Six Sigma performance rating, (i.e. 99.9999% of deliveries are made without error). Though the work sounds simple, it is actually a highly specialized trade that is over a century old and which has become integral to Mumbai's culture.
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