Case- MUMBAI DABBAWALAS: A HIGHLY RESPONSIVE DISTRIBUTION

NETWORK

Source- Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation, 6th

Edition, Sunil Chopra & Peter Meindl, Pearson.

Imagine trying to pick up and deliver 150,000 hot lunches on time every day in a
city where traffic is normally gridlocked. Getting such a distribution system to be
financially successful has defeated many dotcom startups, such as Urbanfetch and
Kozmo.com, that operated in cities like London and New York. The Mumbai
dabbawalas, however, have successfully run such a distribution system for more
than a century—while charging customers about $7/month for this service, and
including reverse logistics: all empty lunchboxes are delivered back home after
lunch. Their distribution network uses several ideas discussed earlier, from milk runs
to cross-docking.

Every working morning around 9 a.m., about 5,000 dabbawalas use milk runs with
bicycles to pick up lunches from about 30 homes each. These freshly made lunches
are packed in steel or plastic containers called tiffins or dabbas (hence the name
dabbawala, or “dabba guy”). Each home has a time window of about a minute for
the pickup, and the schedule is repeated every working day. The milk run ends at the
local train station, where the dabbas are collected and sorted into wooden crates
based on their destination. There are a few stations where multiple train lines
intersect. At these stations, the dabbawalas cross-dock the dabbas between crates to
ensure that each crate contains lunches for the same destination. The lunchboxes
arrive at the destination railway stations by about 11:30 a.m. The destination railway
station serves as a hub from which crates are taken to their final destination, where
the lunches will be consumed. Each dabbawala is responsible for delivering about
40 dabbas. This is typically done using a milk run on a bicycle or handcart, and all
deliveries are completed before 1 p.m. Once the customers finish their lunches, the
entire process is repeated in reverse to return the empty dabbas to their respective
homes by 5 p.m. For this complex network, in which 150,000 individualized pickups
and deliveries are managed daily, the dabbawalas average one delayed delivery in
16 million!

Besides being awed by their accomplishments, it is important to ask how the

dabbawalas succeed while other people failed when trying to provide home delivery
with Urbanfetch and Kozmo.com.