Management education packed in a lunch box

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, March 8, 2007

They deliver lunchboxes to thousands of offices from Mulund to Marine Drive and Virar to Victoria Terminus. They are punctual, zero-error and methodical. The dabbawallas of Mumbai will now share with IIT students the secret of their clockwork precision.
Members of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (MTBSA) will visit the Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSOM) at IIT, Kharagpur, on Monday to deliver a special lecture on logistics and supply chain management. The audience will not only include students and teachers of the engineering and management sections of IITKgp, but also to 30 students and 7 faculty members from University of Nabraska Omaha, US.
“The Mumbai dabbawallas have been a world-famous case study. How they operate with virtually no logistics is what amazes the whole world. In our management textbooks, we can only teach students certain theories and how those can be applied. But these people can show how logistics problems are solved in reality. This will not only be a learning experience for our students but also for the students from Nabraska University,” said professor Probir K Gupta, dean of VGSOM.
The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (MTBSA) is a streamlined 120-year-old organisation of 5,000 semi-literate members that serves two lakh customers every day — collecting lunch boxes from their home, delivering them in office and back home.
Mistakes rarely happen in the dabbawallas’ elegant logistics system that uses 25 km of public transport, 10 km of footwork and multiple transfer points. According to a Forbes 1998 article, one mistake for every eight million deliveries is the norm. “How do they achieve virtual six-sigma quality with zero documentation by just sorting the tiffin boxes to few central points and through a simple colour coding which determines packet routing and prioritising is what the students can learn from them,” Gupta said.
Not surprising then that the students of VGSOM are excited about the lecture. “It is amazing how these semiliterate people run a supply chain with a Rs 30-crore turnover. Their market credibility, teamwork and time management is amazing. They use difficult management theories only found in books,” said Joydeep Bhattacharya, a first-year student.
The students would also get to learn how such a big organisation works without any internal rivalry. “One of the main reasons for 5,000 people working without friction is the way our system operates and also the recruitment process followed by us. We are all descendants of Shivaji’s soldiers and believe in employing people from our own community,” said Manish Tripathy, honorary director of MTBSA, who will be coming to IITKgp for the lecture.
The dabbawallas would also discuss with the students of VGSOM and Nabraska Omaha how to improve their brand positioning. The dabbawallas’ association had been picked by Microsoft in February for a campaign to spread awareness about the benefits of genuine Windows software. The organisation has also launched a website for online booking.
“We have delivered lectures at various educational institutions and industrial organisations. By showing interest in us, Prince Charles and Virgin Atlantis chairman Sir Richards Branson has given us a lot of publicity. We do not have any knowledge but only experience, which we share with others. We would also like the management students in Kolkata to give us some inputs on how to improve our brand value,” Tripathy said.
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