1.

Explain in detail the types of Business logic (Business Rules) the dabbawallahs
follow in their business. i.e., the cost of the business, cost of delivery, total cost of a
dabbah for the client, delivery times etc.
Ans: Business Rules:
The word "dabbawalla" translates from Marathi as "box person" and describes people
who pick up lunches made in an employee's home, take them to workplaces all over
Mumbai, India, collect the empties and take them home again each day. The dabbawallas
maintain a lunch delivery system that has worked effectively for over 100 years with an
amazing degree of success even though the workers do not use cell phones, computer
tracking systems, big highways, etc.
Delivery system: The system operates using a zoning system approach. Each zone is
served by a team of 20-25 dabbawallahs, each serving around 30 customers per day. Each
team operates as a separate business unit, and the team leader (called mukadam) is
responsible for the efficient coordinated functioning of the team. The teams are thus selfadministered work units sharing common agenda with each other. The Dabbawallah
System epitomizes a self-regulating decentralized delivery system, loosely organized as a
cooperative system, under the Nutan Tiffin Box Suppliers Association. There are only 3
hierarchies of authority, making it a rather flat organization. This includes some 5000
workers, 800 mukadams, and a small number of Executive Committee in the Association.
The Executive Committee is primarily involved in conflict resolution, setting the agenda
and administering the welfare activities.
Each dabbawalla will pick up some 35 lunch boxes from workers' homes and apartments
and attach them to his bike. The containers carry codes indicating the dabbawalla, where
it goes, what floor, rail station and place of origin. They are sorted several times, right on
the busy street, before they're carried to the train on racks.
Pay to the workers: Though many people in Mumbai literally live in impromptu slums
on the streets, the dabbawallas earn enough to have "a place of their own. Their own
stove...a place to sleep. Their company, the Tiffin Box Association, helps them financially
at critical timeswhen they're getting married, buying a house, educating their children.
"Providing food to people is seen as an important spiritual thing to do," so that adds
status to the dabbawallas' job, as do the hats they wear. The system works, too, because
customers do not move frequently. Customers may remain the same over 10 or 15 years.
In addition, the dabbawallas are organized into small groups of 20 to 25 with a leader and
specific customers. "They're oriented toward their own job and their customers. They're
oriented toward the group they belong to. Some groups come from the same rural village.
And they're also oriented or identified with the company as a whole". "Those three links
make it a powerful system." It's a big-time buy-in, plus regular pay and status.
Dispute settlement: The dabbawallas gather in their office monthly to settle disputes
from customers or between dabbawallas. The company president, the first ever to have a
college degree, hears and settles arguments. Part of the dabbawalla creed decrees that "if

25 customers complain, the group [of dabbawallas] is thrown out of the organization."
Everyone fears the organization.
Costs and Pricing: The office space also provides a place for religious worship. And
even with a net income of 4,000 to 5,000 rupees a month, the dabbawallas can help
family members in their home villages and set aside savings to buy a home. Customers
pay about 180 rupees per month for the delivery service. The customer only needs to
invest upfront a token sum to purchase the dabba to store the meals. Dabbas are typically
replaced, at the cost to the customer, once every two years. To subscribe to the service,
one merely has to approach any dabbawallah and provide the home address where the
service would be required. This information will be immediately disseminated to the team
responsible for the delivery in the zone the customer resided in. Further negotiation of
price and delivery timings will be done between the customer and the About 10 rupees a
month go to the organization from each worker. Some of this is used for charity or for
helping a member in need.
For New Recruit: Each new recruit would undergo an apprenticeship for two years on a
fixed remuneration of Rs2,000 per month and requires purchasing a delivery route before
being admitted as dabbawallah. This money goes to Shared Capital Trust and is returned
to the dabbawallah upon retirement. Once admitted, the dabbawalla is guaranteed a
monthly income and a job for life. 90% of the city's approximately 5,000 dabbawallahs
come principally from the Pune region of the state of Maharashtra, several hours from
Mumbai. All have left poor farming communities in search of a means to support their
families. They share a common language and have strong social bond. They take great
pride in what they do, and understand that their livelihood depends on their ability to
deliver the meals efficiently. On the office wall of the Tiffin Carriers association hangs a
list of 23 rules, a corporate code of conduct. One in particular sums up the Dabbawallah's
ethic: "No customer should go without food."
The dabbawallas control the business and the quality of the business themselves. Their
job depends on keeping customers happy. So far, they have an extraordinary rate of
success, hovering near 96 percent. That means on average 96 out of every 100 customers
get exactly what they want each day. The dabbawallas get those lunches "to the right
people at the right time virtually all the time."
2. Explain the current Business processes Dabbawallah's perform in their daily
operation and the business model adopted for the delivery network.
Ans: The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (MTBSA) is a streamlined 120 year
old organization with 4,500 semi-literate members providing a quality door-to-door
service to a large and loyal customer base.
MTBSA has managed to survive through these tumultuous years because of the twin
process that combines competitive collaboration between team members with a high level
of technical efficiency in logistics management. It works like this.
After the customer leaves for work, her lunch is packed into tiffin provided by the
dabbawalla. A color-coded notation on the handle identifies its owner and destination.

Once the dabbawalla has picked up the tiffin, he moves fast using a combination of
bicycles, trains and his two feet.
The entire system depends on teamwork and meticulous timing. Tiffins are collected from
homes between 7.00 am and 9.00 am, and taken to the nearest railway station. At various
intermediary stations, they are hauled onto platforms and sorted out for area-wise
distribution, so that a single tiffin could change hands three to four times in the course of
its daily journey.
At Mumbais downtown stations, the last link in the chain, a final relay of dabbawallas
fan out to the tiffins destined bellies. Lunch hour over, the whole process moves into
reverse and the tiffins return to suburban homes by 6.00 pm.
To better understand the complex sorting process, lets take an example. At Vile Parle
Station, there are four groups of dabbawallas, each has twenty members and each
member services 40 customers. That makes 3,200 tiffins in all. These 3,200 tiffins have to
be collected by 9.00 am, reached the station and sorted according to their destinations by
10.00 am when the Dabbawalla Special train arrives. The railway provides sorting areas
on platforms as well as special compartments on trains traveling south between 10.00 am
and 11.30 a.m. During the journey, these 80 dabbawallas regroup according to the
number of tiffins to be delivered in a particular area, and not according to the groups they
actually belong to. If 150 tiffins are to be delivered in the Grant Road Station area, then
four people are assigned to that station, keeping in mind one person can carry no more
than 35-40 tiffins.
During the earlier sorting process, each dabbawalla would have concentrated on locating
only those 40 tiffins under his charge, wherever they come from, and this specialization
makes the entire system efficient and error-free. Typically it takes about ten to fifteen
minutes to search, assemble and arrange 40 tiffins onto a crate, and by 12.30 p.m. they
are delivered to offices.
The delivery system builds around the extensive commuter railway system, the backbone
of the Mumbai transport network, connecting the vast suburbs to the city areas. The
timetable of the railway system and the common delivery deadline for the tiffins induce a
natural clockspeed into the delivery operations. Every dabbawallah understands the need
to race against time to reach his destined station to meet his counterpart who will board
the local train with his quota at the precise hour at a given station. The effect of slip
delivery is immediately discernable. Much of the credits for the success must also go to
the fact that the system seeks to evolve continuously to adapt to local conditions, rather
than blindly following best-practices imported from elsewhere. This is evident, for
instance, from the evolution of the coding system used in the system to track the flow of
dabbas within the entire delivery network. While bar codes are common to modern day
delivery system, its high cost (relative to cost of the service) and the environment
(manned by illiterate workers) meant that the system has to adapt a new approach to track
the flow of dabbas. The dabbawallahs chose to evolve a coding system that speaks to
its bunch of illiterate workers, fully recognizing the fact that its strength lies on its cheap
labour and committed workforce. The code, which is painted on the dabba top, is

restricted first by the size of the top itself 6 inches in diameter. The code uses colour,
dashes, crosses, dots and simple symbols to indicate the various parameters like
originating suburb, route to take, destination- station, whose responsibility, the street,
building, floor et al. The system by its simple structure ensures a smooth flow to and
from destination, though a dabba might pass through as many as 6 persons in each
direction of movement everyday. Since the system is operated by strictly controlled but
loosely linked groups, each group has a certain amount of flexibility in personalizing the
coding system. Thus the mukadam, the manager of each operating group, can personalize
some colors etc to differentiate the dabbas pertaining to each of his group dabbawallah.
Over the years, dashes and crosses have been replaced by simple text which is easy to
read.
Business Model:
The service is at once simple and complex. A network of dabbawallas picks up the boxes
from customers homes or from people who cook lunches to order, then delivers the
meals to a local railway station. The boxes are hand-sorted for delivery to different
stations in central Mumbai, and then re-sorted and carried to their destinations. After
lunch, the service reverses, and the empty boxes are delivered back home.
MTBSA is a remarkably flat organization with just three tiers: the governing council
(president, vice president, general secretary, treasurer and nine directors), the mukadams
and the dabbawallas. Its first office was at Grant Road. Today it has offices near most
railway stations. Here nobody is an employer and none are employees. Each dabbawalla
considers himself a shareholder and entrepreneur. Surprisingly, MTBSA is a fairly recent
entity: the service is believed to have started in the 1880s but officially registered itself
only in 1968. Growth in membership is organic and dependent on market conditions.
Dabbawallas are divided into sub-groups of fifteen to 25, each supervised by four
mukadams. Experienced old-timers, the mukadams are familiar with the colors and
codings used in the complex logistics process. Their key responsibility is sorting tiffins
but they play a critical role in resolving disputes; maintaining records of receipts and
payments; acquiring new customers; and training junior dabbawallas on handling new
customers on their first day. Each group is financially independent but coordinates with
others for deliveries: the service could not exist otherwise. The process is competitive at
the customers end and united at the delivery end.
Each group is also responsible for day-to-day functioning. And, more important, there is
no organizational structure, managerial layers or explicit control mechanisms. The
rationale behind the business model is to push internal competitiveness, which means that
the four Vile Parle groups vie with each other to acquire new customers.
The range of customers includes students (both college and school), entrepreneurs of
small businesses, managers, especially bank staff, and mill workers. They generally tend
to be middle-class citizens who, for reasons of economy, hygiene, caste and dietary

restrictions or simply because they prefer whole-some food from their kitchen, rely on the
dabbawalla to deliver a home cooked mid-day meal.
New customers are generally acquired through referrals. Some are solicited by
dabbawallas on railway platforms. Addresses are passed on to the dabbawalla operating
in the specific area, who then visits the customer to finalize arrangements. Service
charges vary from Rs150 to Rs300 per tiffin per month, depending on location and
collection time. Money is collected in the first week of every month and remitted to the
mukadam on the first Sunday. He then divides the money equally among members of that
group. It is assumed that one dabbawalla can handle not more than 30-35 customers
given that each tiffin weighs around 2 kgs. And this is the benchmark that every group
tries to achieve.
Typically, a twenty member group has 675 customers and earns Rs1,00,000 per month
which is divided equally even if one dabbawalla has 40 customers while another has 30.
Groups compete with each other, but members within a group do not. Its common sense,
points out one dabbawalla.
One dabbawalla could collect 40 tiffins in the same time that it takes another to collect
30. From his earnings of between Rs5,000 to Rs6,000, every dabbawalla contributes
Rs15 per month to the association. The amount is utilized for the communitys
upliftment, loans and marriage halls at concessional rates. All problems are usually
resolved by association officials whose ruling is binding.
Meetings are held office on the 15th of every month at the Dadar. During these meetings,
particular emphasis is paid to customer service. If tiffin is lost or stolen, an investigation
is promptly instituted. Customers are allowed to deduct costs from any dabbawalla found
guilty of such a charge. If a customer complains of poor service, the association can shift
the customers account to another dabbawalla. No dabbawalla is allowed to undercut
another. Before looking into internal disputes, the association charges a token Rs100 to
ensure that only genuinely aggrieved members interested in a solution come to it with
their problems, and the officials time is not wasted on petty bickering.
Logistics is the new mantra for building competitive advantage, the world over.
Mumbais dabbawallas developed their home grown version long before the term was
coined.
Their attitude of competitive collaboration is equally unusual, particularly in India. The
operation process is competitive at the customers end but united at the delivery end,
ensuring their survival since a century and more. Is their business model worth
replicating in the digital age is the big question.

3. Describe in terms of workflow of the current system followed by the

Dabbawallahs. Draw arrow charts as to how their work flows from initiation
(collection) to closure (delivery) of the product.
Ans: Working system of Dabbawallah
o Performance and speed: They pick up from homes and distribute the 200,000 plus
boxes by hand before lunch time. They make an average of 4 change of hands and
3 modes of transport (bus, train, and bicycle).
o Reliability: Approx 5 boxes are mixed up in delivery and an equal amount lost.
Error rate: 0.005%.
o Redundancy: Built in.
o Flexibility and scalability: To add new customers and locations.
Gap Analysis: Though rate of flaws in the service of Dabbawallahs are very less but
still they lack the capacity to overcome some sort of difficulties which they face
because of their 'resistance to change' nature. They are reluctant to make use of
emerging information technology and the changing environment (Global
Competition).
1. Their delivery system is entirely dependent upon a single backbone i.e., Western
Mumbai Railways. It is critical for the success of Dabbawallahs and due to the single
channel dependent system their operation is at great risk. If railways are stopped or if
one rail is missed by the Dabbawalla, their entire operation is halted. Alternative
routes should also be used, like bikes, owing buses, etc.
2. Their coding system proves to be very traditional and unsystematic in context to
today's computerized business world. If one of the Dabbawallah gets absent, the
proxy Dabbawallah might not understand the code and this creates confusion among
the other Dabbawallas. MIS should be developed.
3. Dabbawallah needs to develop an effective Management Information System for
their business to track records of their employees and customers, take regular
feedback from them, and get access to new customers. It is also critical to retain the
existing customers. If the customers are shifting to new office or new apartment,
through the information systems, Dabbawallahs can stay in touch with the customers.
Thus, there is no risk of loss of customers.
4. MTBSA should give basic trainings on computers skills, ask them to communicate
with the customers and take regular feedback from them about their services.
5. They are working only through the word of mouth. Dabbawallahs should focus on
expanding their businesses through the effective and efficient advertisements.

Environment is dynamic, it changes rapidly, so are the lifestyle and taste and
preferences of customers. Dabbawallahs should move according to the preferences of
the customers. It should also develop strategies that help them to sustain with out less
difficulties. They can also think of diversifying their business to related field if the
current business starts to fall. Like MTBSA can open their own restaurants, prepare
food by themselves and deliver it to the offices and schools.
4. From the customers perspective, where do you see errors in the business
model of Monarch Food Suppliers?
Ans: Monarch Food Suppliers was established 6 years back in 2001, by a single
person Mr. Thakur Pyakurel, professionally a Lawyer/Teacher. He focuses on niche
marketing. Monarch Suppliers prepares and supplies food to the employees of banks
on a daily basis. It started its business from only 6 clients and today the number has
rose to 235. It deals with its clients on a contract basis. Food is prepared at the house
of Mr. Pyakurel itself. Six different foods are prepared for six days. There are two
cooks, 5 delivery boys and the owner himself. Carrying of food from home starts
from 9 a.m. depending upon the distances of the destination. Same box is assigned to
the same customer and the coding system in the box help to identify them. The
emptied boxes are carried back to the house of owner in the evening. For the initial
cost of box, customer and the owner equally distribute between themselves. One boy
can carry upto 60 boxes in his bicycle or bike. They charge Rs35 per box per day. The
main issue of Monarch Suppliers is timely delivery of food. Its main competitors are
the restaurants residing near the offices. As a customer, I see some errors in the
business model of Monarch suppliers.
1. They provide standardized food only. We have to eat the food whatever the supplier
brings. They need to customize their product according to the need of customers since
customers have many other better options.
2. The supplier himself should be responsible for buying the box. Customers should
not be imposed the cost of dabba.
3. They should develop a proper Management Information system like developing
web pages through which customers can have access to their service, put their
comments and feedback.
4. Customer is liable to give full payment of the month even though food is not
supplied all day of the month.
5. They entirely depend upon word of mouth for the promotion of their business.
They should focus on advertisements through economic source of medias so that
customers can know about their business and take decision whether to prefer it or not.
6. It does not supply food to the place where there are less than 7 customers. This
condition should be removed.

These are the flaws that I see in the model of Monarch suppliers.
MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

A Case Analysis on
Dabbawallah
Submitted To: Mr. Vivek Rana (Instructor, MIS)
Kathmandu University School of Management

Submitted By: 7592

MBA III Term (Afternoon Shift)
KUSOM
18th December 2007

5. Design Model/ Prototype for Monarch suppliers from the MIS perspective.

MONARCH FOOD SUPPLIER

Personal Information:

Name:
Mobile no.:
Home Address:
Tel. No.:
Information Of The Organization:

Name of the organization:

Department:
E-Mail Address:
Phone No.:
Organization Address:
Food Habit:

Vegetarian

Non-Vegetarian

Schedule Of Delivery

Time of Delivery:
Time of Pick-Up:

[Pleas

Office Days for delivery:

Sunday Monday Tuesday
PAYMENT Mode:

Wednesday

Cash

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Cheque

Credit card
Please
add
if
any
other
information
you
want
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know
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