How Mumbai Dabbawalas Achieve Better than Six Sigma Performance
Pradeep B. Deshpande
President, Six Sigma & Advanced Controls, Inc., and
Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering
University of Louisville
In 2011, an article in Forbes reported that Forbes Magazine had awarded its Six Sigma certification to Mumbai’s Dabbawalas in 2001 for producing less than 3.45 defects (wrongful delivery, late delivery) in 1 million deliveries.
Mumbai’s Dabbawalas are a group of 5,000 semi-literate lunchbox delivery boys who deliver 200,000 lunchboxes a day, six days a week, and they have been at it since 1890. So admired are the Dabbawalas that luminaries like Prince Charles, Virgin Atlantic Chairman Richard Branson, and others have visited them, Harvard and Columbia students and others have studied their operations, and national and international media outlets have covered their story. All this attention to learn how a group of semi-literate people with no understanding of statistics are able to achieve such legendary performance, perhaps with the hope they too could learn how to achieve such performance.
First, six sigma is a way of achieving the best possible performance (minimum variance) in virtually all human endeavors, or so we thought. Six sigma was pioneered at Motorola by M/S Bill Smith and Mikel Harry in the late seventies. So successful was six sigma at Motorola that the company received the inaugural Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award from President Reagan in 1988.
In the six sigma community, several certifications are given in recognition for increasingly higher levels of expertise in six sigma: (1) Green Belt — entry level certification given for competence in basic six sigma concepts, (2) Black Belt — Advanced level expertise in six sigma combined with project execution experience, (3) Master Black Belt- Teaching skills and experience in addition to the requirements for the Black Belt, and (4) Champion-Corporate level individual who oversees the six sigma initiative in the company and interacts with senior management.
How do Dabbawalas achieve such exemplary performance and how can it replicated by others? Actually, there are two X factors for their outstanding performance. Six sigma is one of them and the other may surprise you. Although Dabbawalas do not understand six sigma, I and numerous others have scrutinized their process and it is easy to see that theirs is a six sigma operation. I had done an interview for BBC Radio in 2003 just after Prince Charles visited the Dabbawalas and I had admiringly explained to the listeners how Dabbawalas was a six sigma operation. I didn’t know then that there was another X factor responsible for the exemplary performance. I discovered it courtesy of an article in the Financial Times in 2013.
The other X factor for exemplary performance of Dabbawalas is their high level of internal excellence. Dabbawalas are Varkaris (pilgrims) who travel 200 km on foot every year from two temple towns, Alandi (Sant Dnyaneshwar) and Dehu Road (Sant Tukaram), to another temple town, Pandharpur (Vitthal-Rukmai), via Pune. So, the source of the high level of internal excellence of Dabbawalas is bhakti (devotion to God). To the Dabbawalas, their customer is God. How dare they let their God go hungry or deliver lunch late?
Not everyone is endowed with bhakti, but fortunately, internal excellence can also be enhanced with Sadhana (meditation), or more generally yoga. Thus, by combining internal excellence with external excellence-six sigma, exemplary performance can be achieved. This is a perfectly general statement; it applies to all human endeavors!
The article, The Secret of Exemplary Performance in BizEd magazine, September/October 2019 sheds further light on the link between internal excellence and the performance in the external world. BizEd is a publication of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the body that accredits B-school curricula in America.
I had a communication on the link of internal excellence to the performance in the external world with Mikel Harry, Co-creator of six sigma, several years ago and he really liked the concept and recognized its profound implications for a better (in terms of defects) and a more peaceful world.
SAC and Dabbawalas have signed an MOU to explain to the world how to strive for exemplary performance.
Relatedly, we have launched a new, first-in-the-world certification, Six Sigma Grandmaster that kicks up a notch beyond traditional six sigma certifications. It recognizes organizations who have not only demonstrated the power of six sigma but they have also demonstrated the importance of the link of internal excellence to the performance in the external world. Mumbai’s Dabbawalas are the first in the world to receive this certification.
Dabbawalas appear to have a large fan-base. Within a few days of posting the information on their certification on social media, the post attracted more than 4,500 views according to the verified claims of the spokesperson for the Dabbawalas.
Several US organizations in disparate areas of commerce have implicitly understood the importance of internal excellence in the pursuit of excellence in external activities. Among them are: (1) Bridgewater Associates, (2) Salesforce.com, Inc., (3) Chicago Cubs, and (4) Seattle Seahawks.
You too can achieve exemplary performance by combining your favorite minimum variance seeking quality initiative with a pursuit for higher levels of internal excellence.
A Plea. The suburban trains in Mumbai have been shut down for several months due to the Pandemic and the Dabbawalas are out of work. As it is, their income is meager (about $220/month) but now they have no income. Consider sending a donation to their nonprofit organization, Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust.
Pradeep Deshpande is Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at the University of Louisville and President of Louisville, KY-based Six Sigma and Advanced Controls, Inc. Pradeep has developed a scientific framework for external and internal excellence toward a better and more peaceful world. He has published several papers on the various aspects of the framework in India and the United States and has made presentations in several countries including the office of the Prime Minister of India and the Parliament of Peru always to enthusiastic audiences. In 2015 his company published the book “Six Sigma for Karma Capitalism” (amazon) and another titled, “The Nature of Ultimate Reality and How It Can Transform Our World” coauthored with James P. Kowall, a triple board certified physician with a PhD in Theoretical Physics (amazon).
