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What we are learning from The Dabbawala – Fast lunch delivery in Mumbai

Lately, I’ve been studying the management system of the Dabbawala, a 125 year old lunch delivery service in Mumbai, India.

It has a network of 5000 Dabbawala who deliver lunch boxes (tiffins) across the entire city.

Some takeaways:

• Simple value proposition: a homemade lunch amongst a sea of fast food
• Six Sigma certification despite low technology (they had no website and did not use SMS until recently)
• Flat management works best: They have a 3 tier hierarchy including executives, Dabbawala managers, and Dabbawalas
• Core beliefs of hard work, pride, and entrepreneurial ownership of the business exist at all levels
• 99.99% accuracy of food deliveries
• The business enjoys a 5-10% yearly growth rate

A great recap of numbers and pictures of the Dabbawalas on SlideShare:

Mumbai’s Dabbawalas – Amazing Management Success Story India

For the past few weeks, HeroEx has been streamlining its business. We have been working on this:

• Keeping overhead as low as possible
• Limited product offering (just the most popular items) for standard deliveries; we are still continuing custom orders for a premium price
• Recruiting more Delivery Heroes and Delivery Managers
• New set of guiding principles for Delivery Heroes and Delivery Managers
• Redesigned website: cleaner with a focus on products, Heroes, and building community
• Improving our internal management systems
• Maintaining our 100% accuracy and timeliness (1 hour) on deliveries

Thanks for your support!

Marissa

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Tags: 1 hour, Dabbawala, deliveries, delivery, hero, Heroes, HeroEx, Lunch box, malouie, marissa louie, Mumbai, san francisco, Six Sigma, Technology

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 1:27 am and is filed under Heroes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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