Mumbai's Lunchbox supply chain

Hi, I am Rakesh, Welcome to my blog......

In an era in which many can not picture an effective supply chain working without the advantage of technology, Mumbai India has an example of a compact, just-in-time, 99.99 per cent reliable supply chain working without any technology. Only in the movie Lunchbox, you can see an instance in which a Dabbawala makes a mistake. 

Founded in 1890, today 5,000 dabbawallas serve 200,000 Mumbai customers. This involves 400,000 last mile transactions per day (including returning empty tiffin carriers), with an error rate of 1 in 16 million transactions. This high-reliability rate earned them a six sigma designation and an ISO 9001 accreditation for their efficient supply chain.

This supply chain delivers home-cooked food to the office in time for lunch and then returns the empty tiffin-boxes by the end of the working day. Dabbawallas receive Rs 9000 a month per user and charge Rs 400 a month per user. The dabbawalla supply chain combines baton relay and sortation, hub moves to hub moves, and deliveries to the hub and spoke. Dabbawallas receive tiffin boxes from their client's homes from 8:30 am to 9:30 am. A dabbawala is responsible for 30-35 tiffin boxes in a region. 

From 10:34 to 11:20 am the inbound journey to office workplaces begins. From 11:20 to 12:05 pm unloading is done at the destination station, and another area/building destination sort occurs. By 12:30 – 1:00 pm, all the tiffins get delivered. A similar reverse supply chain is followed between 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm to get empty tiffin boxes back home.

A meticulous coding system is in place to avoid the interchanging of lunchboxes. The lunches are sorted according to where they came from, and where they are intended to go.  Each tiffin is labelled with an alphanumeric code and loaded onto city trains before traversing the city’s maze of over 22 million before being handed off to local dabbawalas who complete the last part of the delivery. After the food is eaten, the tiffins are collected by dabbawalas and make a return trip to their respective homes.

Example of the coding system:

• BVI: Borivali, a suburb in Mumbai. A pickup station.
• 9 RC 14: Code for dabbawallas at the destination. This user code is different for each customer
• RC: Raheja Chambers, name of a building or office at the destination
• 14: Floor number
• E: Code for the dabbawalla at the destination railway station.

To make the supply chain efficient the principles followed are:

• Value Time – Dabbawalls don’t wait for unprepared tiffin boxes for more than 2 minutes; if they do, the downstream supply chain will be adversely affected. If a customer becomes a bottleneck in the supply chain for three consecutive days their services are terminated.
• Value Customer Service – The shelf life of the lunch boxes is just 4-5 hours if it is not delivered on time food goes waste.
• Minimal dependence on technology – The dabbawallas are now using Web technology and SMS for orders, but for the most part, this is a manual operation. It relies on manual operations carried out on trains, cycles, wooden carts by barefoot men.
• High visibility and transparency – The dabbawalla-system ensures that all the dabbawallas understand exactly what is happening and when — to the minute. If certain deadlines and hand-offs are missed, people don’t eat. It’s as simple as that.