Mumbai Dabbawallas and Their Six Sigma Quality Service

I wanted to write on this topic since long and it was Seth Godin’s post on dabbawalas that came as a good reminder to finally write a post on Six Sigma quality service of Mumbai’s Dabbawallas.

These dabbawalas, more popularly known as tiffinwalas, are the people who carry food from home in lunch boxes and deliver them to office workers. At first read, you might think that it’s an easy job and why am I mentioning about six sigma in this post. Read on…

There are 1,75,000+ lunch boxes served everyday by approximately 5,000 dabbawalas within 3 hours using a 25 KM public transportation system of Mumbai. These lunch boxes are picked up from home and then delivered to office workers by lunch time. Dabbawalas carry these lunch boxes for delivery using local trains, buses etc.. and deliver the lunch boxes on time. This service has been in existence for over 115 years and has been given Six Sigma award by Forbes magazine. There is no six sigma training conducted for them to deliver these lunch boxes without errors and yet they manage to keep their defects at just 1 defect every 6,000,000 deliveries. That’s one defect per 6 million opportunities! Can you believe that?

I am Six Sigma Greenbelt certified and these dabbawalas have always inspired me in a big way with their six sigma quality service. You should also know that these dabbawalas do not take help of computers or gadgets while they pickup the lunch boxes and deliver them in offices. However they do allow booking of service by SMS and also have a website for online booking.

If your business doesn’t use Six Sigma, start using it today!