New York City food bank is using lean operations to improve its operations so it
ID: 366269 • Letter: N
Question
New York City food bank is using lean operations to improve its operations so it can get more meals to more families lean principle contributed to substantial improvement in operational results at a food bank.
The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a different idea.
Instead of a check, it offered kaizen.
A Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement,” kaizen is a main ingredient in Toyota’s business model and a key to its success, the company says. It is an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance. Put more simply, it is about thinking outside the box and making small changes to generate big results.
Toyota’s emphasis on efficiency proved transformative for the Food Bank.
At a soup kitchen in Harlem, Toyota’s engineers cut down the wait time for dinner to 18 minutes from as long as 90. At a food pantry on Staten Island, they reduced the time people spent filling their bags to 6 minutes from 11. And at a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where volunteers were packing boxes of supplies for victims of Hurricane Sandy, a dose of kaizen cut the time it took to pack one box to 11 seconds from 3 minutes.
Toyota has “revolutionized the way we serve our community,” said Margarette Purvis, the chief executive and president of the Food Bank.
But Toyota’s initial offer to the charity in 2011 was met with apprehension.
“They make cars; I run a kitchen,” said Daryl Foriest, director of distribution at the Food Bank’s pantry and soup kitchen in Harlem. “This won’t work.”
When Toyota insisted it would, Mr. Foriest presented the company with a challenge.
“The line of people waiting to eat is too long,” Mr. Foriest said. “Make the line shorter.”
Toyota’s engineers went to work. The kitchen, which can seat 50 people, typically opened for dinner at 4 p.m., and when all the chairs were filled, a line would form outside. Mr. Foriest would wait for enough space to open up to allow 10 people in. The average wait time could be up to an hour and a half.
Toyota made three changes. They eliminated the 10-at-a-time system, allowing diners to flow in one by one as soon as a chair was free. Next, a waiting area was set up inside where people lined up closer to where they would pick up food trays. Finally, an employee was assigned the sole duty of spotting empty seats so they could be filled quickly. The average wait time dropped to 18 minutes and more people were fed.
The unusual partnership between Toyota and the Food Bank, which one Food Bank coordinator compared to a cultural exchange program, highlights a different way for-profit businesses can help their communities, experts said.
Provide your opinion on what your learned from it in context of implications for lean principles on operations in a not-for-profit context. DO NOT PLAGARIZE + ORIGINAL PARAGRAPHS ONLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Explanation / Answer
Kaizen- i.e the process of continuous improvement is not limited to profit making organisations. It is not even limited to organisations. It is applicable for individuals, groups and communities. Continuous improvement is the only way to evolve oneself.
As demonstrated by the paragraph, the use of Kaizen in Food Bank by Toyota engineers is a remarkable example of the application of learnings translated from one organisation to other. This improvement is the efficiency of the process with which Food Bank served the community demonstrates the significance of effective operations management in an organisation.
Best practices from Toyota manufacturing were translated to Food Bank operations and it resulted in more people being served in a lesser amount of time and with a better utilization of resources. For a charitable/ non profit organization, it becomes even more significant to apply lean management because the resources are always limited due to the dependence on charity. To make the best utilization of these limited resources, lean management is of utmost significance. This also leads to the organization serving a larger set of people due to effective operations management.
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