What Could Kaizen Do for the NYC Food Bank?
by Miki Saxon
There will be numerous stories today about the events of 12 years ago; however, I already shared the only personal story I believed added a different component to the usual conversation.
Instead of looking backwards, I want to show you the present and what one company, Toyota, did to change the course of food philanthropy in New York City—a lesson that other areas would do well to consider.
Many businesses of all sizes write checks to charities and others offer time off for their people to actively pursue projects.
Toyota wrote check, too, but then had a better idea.
Instead of a check, it offered kaizen. … an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance.
Think small improvements that offer large results over time.
What could a bunch of engineers and a dose of kaizen really do for the country’s largest anti-hunger charity?
To get the full impact you need to read the story, but consider this,
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.
The biggest take-away of this story is the absolute proof that the only thing required to take an approach known to yield positive results and successfully apply it in circumstances with no relationship to the norm is not an open mind, but rather a willingness to be proven wrong.
“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.”
Happily, Foriest was proven wrong.
Toyota has “revolutionized the way we serve our community,” said Margarette Purvis, the chief executive and president of the Food Bank. (…) “I never thought that what we needed were a bunch of engineers. In our world food is king, but we didn’t know that the queen would be kaizen.”
So the next time you are about to reject an outré solution, remember what kaizen did for the NY Food Bank and rethink your decision.
Flickr image credit: Inha Leex Hale
