Toyota offered operational consulting rather than a blank check to an NYC food bank. This is the definition of sustainable operational improvement and the results are staggering. One paragraph sums up the results:
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.
I’m impressed by this initiative in many ways. First, Toyota could have easily just cut a check and moved on. Second, the Food Bank could have (and almost did) refuse the help. Third, those gains are amazing — 3 minutes to 11 seconds for box packing. WOW! — and based on classic operations management. For example, batch processing increases wait time – sit people one at a time as seats become available rather than waiting for ten seats to open up.
What Toyota has done should be applauded and emulated. At least one group of students at Penn State agree with that statement and are putting in the time to show it. Students in the Penn State Global Business Brigades take the knowledge they’ve aquired and, among other projects, transfer it to micro-enterprises in Panama.
And more information on Penn State Global Business Brigades: http://psugbb.weebly.com/
Thanks to Christy Milliken, an attorney in Washington DC, for bringing this article to my attention.