
In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity - kmfrk
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/nyregion/in-lieu-of-money-toyota-donates-efficiency-to-new-york-charity.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&
======
nathanb
One thing that's really cool about being a software developer (and I promise
I'll relate this to the article in a sec...) is that you can practice your
craft by yourself, with freely-available tools, and then point at something
cool that you have done. This is advice that I give to software developers
seeking jobs -- spend some time on your job search, but also spend some time
contributing to open source projects or creating cool things of your own,
which you can then point to as a demonstration of your craft.

This seems like a great opportunity for those in other professions to do the
same. Laid off from your Industrial Systems Engineering job and looking for
work? Help a homeless shelter optimize their processes. Accountant? Donate
some time to a local thrift store to help get their books in order.

I think this could really hit the mutual-benefit sweet spot: it helps you get
a job, and it helps an organization trying to benefit the community as well.

~~~
nknighthb
I've actually tried to do stuff like this before. Offers of skilled assistance
from individuals seem to be refused or ignored. You're welcome to fill some
soup bowls, though!

~~~
tbrownaw
Do you know if this is because they don't know how to handle that, or because
it would step on people's toes (giving volunteers power over presumably-paid
staff), or because they're afraid of legal issues (suppose the volunteer
bookkeeper gets something wrong), or some other reason?

~~~
nknighthb
No, I don't. Mostly I was outright ignored, where it was active refusal it
wasn't exactly a detailed explanation, just some polite version of "Thanks,
but we're not interested.". I'm not particularly motivated to press matters
when someone refuses help.

~~~
prawn
Tried something similar, and received a similar response. Lost interest and
moved on to other things.

------
grimtrigger
Kudos to Mr. Foriest for taking Toyota up on their offer. When someone comes
along and says "Hey, we can show you how to do your job better", most people
take it as a threat. Thats my guess as to why programs like this aren't more
popular. No one wants to look incompetent (though I certainly wouldn't look at
it that way).

~~~
saraid216
That's because it _is_ a threat. Disruption to your current process has a
cost, and there is no assurance that such a cost will be paid back anytime
soon, if ever.

~~~
Dylan16807
That is not what the word threat means.

------
Amadou
I thought it was pretty poor reporting for the article not to mention that
what Toyota donated was industrial engineering expertise.

In college we called the guys in the IE program "imaginary engineers" but in
real life the discipline is responsible for making assembly lines and other
manufacturing processes work as efficiently as possible. All modern
manufacturers of any scale live and die by their IE departments.

~~~
apalmer
I studied Operation Research & Industrial Engineering in college. The rest of
the engineering students called ORIE, 'Oh Really It's Engineering?'

~~~
philip1209
I did "systems engineering", which was OR and control theory. While it was
somewhat soft engineering for the first years, the final year was intense
optimization once a proper mathematical and computational background was
established.

~~~
apalmer
I have both sides of this:

on one hand its true, cuz i spent almost my entire last 2 years in 'hardcore'
optimization, network flows, computer simulation etc, with only a couple
'filler' courses in facilities design, efficiency etc...

on the other hand i got into the major cuz my GPA was horrid, and my advisor
who was one of the leaders of the engineering physics department was like yeah
dont bother to apply to the engineering physics you should apply to orie
instead...

------
dwaltrip
This is really cool, and I hate to nitpick, but comparing "up to 90 minutes"
with a "average wait time of 18 minutes" is misleading, wrong, and annoying.
Let's compare average to average, not max to average.

------
NickM
This is a fascinating approach to solving one of the greatest problems
charities face: negative public perception of "overhead". People react
extremely negatively when a charity has any significant percentage of
donations going to overhead, which makes it very difficult for charities to
invest in themselves to improve efficiency and promote growth. By donating
"efficiency", Toyota is doing the equivalent of donating money to charities
but in a way that allows them to use it for overhead without it actually being
labeled as such. Brilliant!

------
mratzloff
This is great. A check is easy and visible, but if companies really want to
donate to charity, employee time makes a huge difference.

This is one example, but there are dozens. PR and marketing, organizing,
programming systems, construction expertise... It happens less often than it
should but frequently also more often than we hear about. Toyota just has a
good PR team.

It's also a better way for you personally to get involved. Anyone can mop
floors or scrape old paint. Very few have the skills you have, so figuring out
how to donate your expertise is a better use of your time.

~~~
mjs
The whole article is a PR team's dream: an article in a prominent paper
highlighting both their company's charitable work and efficiency expertise!
(But a nice story regardless.)

~~~
VintageCool
That was my interpretation too. This may have been motivated as PR for
Toyata's efficiency consulting arm.

------
mathattack
Giving expertise can be much more valuable than tossing money at a problem.

~~~
bargl
I've volunteered a lot of places and money is easy to give, but to invest time
is frequently more valuable and makes more of a difference. It's also a lot
harder to give up a Saturday (or in this case a few productive engineers) in
order to really help out. It puts the problem on your radar in a completely
different way.

~~~
mathattack
I think there is a value to know when to do which. Some charities have more
money than expertise. Some have more expertise than money. By giving a little
time, you can see what's needed. For better or worse, the average person
running a charitable organization has more good intentions than managerial or
technical training.

------
rescripting
I love this idea, and I'd love to see more of it. However, I don't think
companies are properly incentivised to offer employee time/expertise over
money. You can get tax breaks for donating cash, leading a lot of companies to
donate not only for the good PR, but also the kickback of a tax deduction.

A tax break for companies that also donate time/expertise would be great,
although I have no idea how you'd structure it.

~~~
dpe82
They should be able to declare an in-kind contribution at some reasonable
hourly rate for the engineers' time.

~~~
jaggederest
Usually doesn't work that way, unfortunately. I can't donate my time through
LLC and get a tax break, at least.

------
thisjustinm
I worked alongside industrial engineers at a Kodak manufacturing plant that
applied the Toyota Production System to their operation over the course of
several years (once you start you're never done, thus continuous improvement,
etc) and the results were dramatic (in a good way). I liken it to "industrial
UX" as a lot of the observational techniques and ways of getting to the true
root cause of issues are not too different than what a UX person would do for
a website. Personally, I still use what I learned whether it's laying out my
kitchen or my desk at work to maximize my own efficiency.

------
hencq
As an industrial engineer I'm quite excited about this. I'm 100% sure there's
tons of opportunities for improvements at most charities (heck, at most
companies as well). One big aspect of the Toyota Production System is that it
encourages everyone to help introduce improvements. The traditional example is
allowing conveyor belt workers to stop the belt when they discovered a
problem. If they can instill that type of culture at the charities they work
with, the benefits could be even bigger. Teaching a man how to fish and all
that.

------
motters
This is an example of making a bad system more efficiently bad. So it's great
that the process can be made more efficient, but that doesn't address the
cause of why people are having to rely upon food banks in the first place or
why food banks have been expanding their activities in the last few years. If
food banks exist then something is wrong at a more fundamental level and it
would be better to direct efforts towards trying to fix that problem.

~~~
Dylan16807
What's wrong with food banks? Let's look at the options to handle a person
without a job or savings.

1\. ignore them, of course

2\. give them a job

3\. give them money

4\. give them food

1 is awful, 2 is infeasible, you can't magically find a productive job for
everyone, 3 and 4 both seem fine to me. Would you have them all buying food in
stores instead? That seems like it'll take more money to get the same amount
of people fed.

What would you prefer?

~~~
nhaehnle
I would say that 3 tends to be better than 4. This is because it allows
greater agency and self-determination to the people you help, which in turn
means a greater improvement to their life.

The only downsides I can see are (1) a soup kitchen may become a place for
social networks to be established, which is also a benefit for those helped,
and (2) the food-to-money ratio may be greater if a soup kitchen can buy the
food in bulk (though then one might think about setting up systems where poor
people can buy-in-bulk together).

As for 2, this option is actually feasible and the best of all four you have
listed. It may not be possible to find a job of the same productivity as the
average currently employed person, but you don't have to. As long as the
productivity is positive (no matter how small), you get a benefit to society.
And, obviously, the benefit to those you help by giving them a job is many
orders of magnitudes higher than if you just gave them money, let alone just
giving them food.

~~~
srinivasanv
I think it's okay that, as the donor, you want some reassurance that they
won't spend all your money on drugs. They have a choice to not accept your
donation.

Ideally it would be a combination of money and food.

~~~
marvin
You don't need reassurances about how the money will be used. Part of it may
be used for drugs. But if a drug user is self-destructive enough to buy only
drugs and no food, he or she would probably just take an overdose anyway.

As a case in point, Norway's social safety net provides a living wage to
anyone who can't provide for themselves. This involves a lot of drug users.
They do end up spending some of the money on drugs, but at least they don't
starve or freeze to death. I think this is a tradeoff that's worth it. You
both save the effort of micromanaging and provide some dignity to people who
have too little of it. If someone wants to be self-destructive, they will be
regardless of the circumstances.

------
venomsnake
Hmm can anyone match the cost of the "donation" to typical monetary donations
for similar causes?

Because deploying engineers is not cheap too. Toyota provided more bang for
the buck that is for sure, but were they in the red or black compared to just
writing a check?

~~~
Xylakant
I don't think this is a viable question. The value that the given good (money,
expertise) has to the donating entity is of no concern for the people
receiving it. For them, the value they can extract is of importance. So the
interesting question is "if Toyota had cut a check of the same monetary value
as their own costs, would that be of higher value to the charity?" and I'm
pretty sure the answer is no. Even if the current savings may be lower than
the cost of the engineers, the process changes will hopefully propagate and
still bear fruit in a decade. Money would be gone by then.

~~~
consultant23522
I once worked at a company that liked to do charitable team building. They'd
take about 40 engineers and IT people out and do things like serve food or
unpackage toys for little kids (remove matchbox cars from the package for
example). While I enjoyed the day out of the office I think it was a waste of
money (our salaries). If 40 people make $80k/yr on average with 240 working
days per year that's $333 per person * 40 = $13,333. You could've hired a
minimum wage worker full time for the whole year for that kind of money. All
for the novelty of "my department did charity work."

~~~
Xylakant
Well, I guess the gain for your team was not the donation - as you admit by
saying "I enjoyed the time". The case here is quite different though: The
engineers did not package toys or serve food. They brought in expertise to
make the whole process of packaging boxes and serving food faster - and with
quite impressive results: Cutting down the packaging to ~ 1/20th of the
original time is an efficiency gain, even if you hire minimum wage workers to
do the job. Cutting the waiting time to 1/5th is a gain for everyone involved,
the person waiting and the servers.

------
twentysix
Related :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EedMmMedj3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EedMmMedj3M)

This is the video of Toyota Production System being used in the aftermath of
Hurricane Sandy as mentioned in the article.

------
caycep
In the country of Henry Ford, it's sad that it took Toyota to do this.

~~~
snambi
Toyota is the Ford of the world lately.

~~~
caycep
True. But optimization and improvisation was being thought about for the past
century; how much lost opportunity from not doing this in the '50's and '60's?

~~~
apalmer
This is pretty much the official reason why Toyota and the rest of its
Japanese brethren took over car manufacturing. The opportunity wasn't lost,
American companies ignored it, japanese companies didnt and so after a decade
of application they drank our milkshake. It is literally the history of
Operations Research and Industrial Engineering.

------
gashad
> "... [Toyota engineers] drew a layout identifying spots where there were
> slowdowns. They reorganized the shelves by food groups and used colored tape
> to mark the grain, vegetable, fruit and protein sections. The time clients
> spent in the pantry was reduced nearly by half."

Ikea needs to hire Toyota to cut the time I shop there in half. That place is
a maze! Maybe it's by design . . .

~~~
goodcanadian
Definitely by design. They want to keep you in there shopping as long as they
can so that hopefully you will buy more.

------
knowaveragejoe
It's interesting the direction that corporate giving is taking. Here's a neat
interactive from the Chronicle of Philanthropy showing the shift away from
cash donations to products and volunteerism:

[http://philanthropy.com/article/How-America-s-
Biggest/140269...](http://philanthropy.com/article/How-America-s-
Biggest/140269/)

------
dorian-graph
It's good that people are doing this, it's often a lot better than throwing
money at a problem. An organisation that does similar things in India is Atma
([http://atma.org.in/](http://atma.org.in/)).

------
legulere
The problem when you measure one thing and optimize it the things you don't
measure often get worse. That's an important thing to keep in mind when
optimizing.

------
vanderZwan
To quote this little gem from Ghostbusters:

"I've worked in the private sector... they expect results!" \- Ray Stantz

------
imran
Wondering what Bill Gates and Warren Buffet could offer to the community
(kaizen up!)

------
RyanMcGreal
Of course, at one time corporations paid enough in taxes to fund social
security programs that meant people didn't need to go to soup kitchens to get
a meal.

~~~
abtinf
Of course, at one time, people spent a moment of critical reflection before
speaking. But I suppose trolls aren't people.

Here is some real data from a left-center think tank:

[http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=203)

Please show me the drop in corporate income tax collections. I don't see it.
What I see is that corporate tax revenues have dramatically outpaced
inflation, meaning we collect more real revenue from corporations than at any
other point in history.

For example, in 1960, corporate tax revenue was ~$22B. A dollar from 1960 is
worth $7.76 today [1]. To keep pace with inflation, today's revenue would
would have to be ~$170B. 2012 corporate tax collections was $240B, or
significantly greater than inflation.

And the further back in history you go, the more dramatic the effect.

[1]
[http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)

~~~
potatolicious
Wouldn't it be more useful to measure corporate tax collection per capita?
Keeping pace with inflation is only meaningful if the population is static.

From your numbers and the 1960 census, it looks like we were collecting
$944/pp (2013 dollars). Accounting for today's population, we're now
collecting $771/pp.

Assuming you buy the idea at all that corporate taxes have an obligation to
feed the poor, it certainly does look like the supporting-power of said taxes
have decreased over time.

~~~
abtinf
I think trying to talk about corporate tax collection per capita makes the
discussion much more complex because we have to consider a lot of other
questions (such as determining the impact of corporations on median standard
of living).

But let me take a stab at it anyway.

I think its fair to say that the GP's concern is not collections per capita,
but collections per person in poverty. In the 1950s, there were 39.5M people
in poverty [1], while in 2012 there were 46.2M people in poverty [2]. So in
2012 dollars, we were spending ~$4500 per person in poverty in 1950, while
today we spend ~$5200 per person in poverty.

Of course, you can play with the start and end dates to make the trend look
different. But the fact is, by just about any measure, corporations paying
quite a bit in taxes.

[1] [http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/#3](http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/#3)
[2]
[http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2011/...](http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2011/table3.pdf)

------
smackfu
Efficiency experts coming in to a situation they know nothing about and
suggesting things can be done better? That sounds awfully familiar. I'm glad
it worked out here, but it's often a recipe for disaster.

Edit: Wow, guess there is a lot of love for efficiency experts.

~~~
saosebastiao
Expertise doesn't have to be situational or contextual. Soup kitchen
_operations_ can benefit from operations experts, even if they have no
experience with the soup kitchen context. They do this using the same tool
that programmers use to model the world: abstraction.

~~~
mjn
Sometimes, yes, but as things get more complex, operations experts do tend to
get more specialized. If you took some logistics engineers from Amazon and
Exxon and had them swap places, they wouldn't be able to immediately do the
same job, though if they're good they should certainly be able to learn the
new context.

~~~
saosebastiao
"If they're good" is a pretty vague qualifier. They aren't an expert if they
aren't good, wouldn't you say?

Amazon hires plenty of Industrial Engineers, Ops Researchers, Business
Intelligence Engineers, etc. from completely different contexts. My coworker
and I were both recruited away from the same company, which was in a very
specialized manufacturing company (making adhesives and labels). Learning how
to use the internal tools was a lot harder than adapting to a completely new
context, because expertise can apply easily to new contexts through
appropriate abstraction.

~~~
mjn
I mostly know about shipping and petrochemicals, which are at least _somewhat_
specialized, so I could be wrong about other areas. I personally wish
everything were more abstracted, because in applied AI work (my area) the lack
of uniform abstractions where we can just drop in off the shelf stuff to solve
a company's problem is a big issue!

It's not so much that the techniques are completely different, as that people
who work in the area use a set of abstractions built for that area, and are
expected to know those particular abstractions, along with the terminology,
typical practices, and constraints on why things are done a certain way.
Maersk logistics engineers have a set of approaches built up over the years
relating to the economic, legal, and technical context of shipping, for
example; there's a whole pile of domain knowledge there, in addition to the
general knowledge.

In petrochemicals some chemical-engineering experience is often preferred as
well, since optimizing a refinery complex doesn't always break down cleanly
between logistics and process-engineering specialties, so you often want
people with backgrounds in both.

