Who could speak better than them on managerial skills? These management gurus are not business tycoons or managers of a multi national company; but they are not lesser than them as well.
The speakers belonged to an organisation with Six Sigma and ISO 9001:2000 certifications, fans like Prince Charles and Richard Branson (of Virgin Airways), Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Guinnesse Book of World Records registrations. They were Raghunath Medge, President, and Gangaram Talekar, Secretary of Dabbawala Association, Mumbai.
Dabba system (lunch box distributors) in Mumbai is a perfect example of low error rate, customer satisfaction, time management and discipline. Students of International School of Business and Media in Bangalore learnt these basic principles through the simple dabba system on Wednesday. The students of Business Management course applauded the achievements of semi-literate or illiterate Dabbawalas.
This unique and highly efficient 117-year old logistics system has an error rate of one in 16 million transactions.
 “I don’t know the exact meaning of error, but I know if we don’t deliver the correct dabbas on time, it’ll hit our business,” Mr Talekar told the students. To reduce the errors during nearly 16 million transactions for each of 2 lakh boxes, dabbawalas use colour codes, numbers and different marks on the dabbas, he said.
He added: “Our customer is our Maharaja (King) and our first priority. We decided the timing to meet Prince Charles during our leisure. Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh came to our function on time (2 pm) as he knew we couldn’t compromise on our schedules even for his speech.”
Around 5,000 dabbawalas in Mumbai serve 2 lakh customers everyday by delivering customer’s home-made lunch at their work places before lunch time and giving the lunch boxes back to their residence in the evening for around Rs 300 to 500.