A recent news in Hindu, titled “Food for thought from dabbawallahs”, reminded of their operational excellence.
The dabbawallahs deliver home-cooked food to their customers daily in the city of Mumbai, India. They transport an astounding 200,000 Tiffin boxes daily from each customer’s home to office and back.
It is worth mentioning that in 1998, Forbes Global magazine, conducted a quality assurance study on the Dabbawalas’ operations and gave it a Six Sigma efficiency rating of 99.999999% accuracy. This means that the Dabbawalas made only one error in six million transactions.
A case study on the dabbawallahs by ICFAI highlights that “Their six sigma performance put them on the list of Six Sigma rated companies, along with multinationals like Motorola and GE. Achieving this rating was no mean feat, considering that the Dabbawalas did not use any technology or paperwork, and that most of them were illiterate or semiliterate. Apart from Forbes, the Dabbawalas have aroused the interest of many other international organizations, media and academia”.