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In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity
- mathattack 13y agoGiving expertise can be much more valuable than tossing money at a problem.
- bargl 13y agoI'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 13y agoI 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.
- eksith 13y agoEspecially since expertise is usually one of the first things bought with donated money.
- rix0r 13y agoI can't tell if this is sarcasm. People are usually unaware of their own incompetence (I don't mean the term harshly), so I would expect hiring outside expertise seems would usually take a back seat to just buying supplies.
- eksith 13y agoNot sarcasm. Yes, supplies are one of those first things as well, but I've been to plenty of charities to note that when things get overwhelming (and it's very easy to get to that point, even before they realize that's what's happening because they're so busy with other things), they need outside consultants ASAP. Often times, bookkeeping and organization become some of the biggest chores when a charity that gets big. It's quite something to watch someone manage a charity with just a bunch of Excel sheets, but I've seen that in action.
- grimtrigger 13y agoKudos 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 13y agoThat'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 13y agoThat is not what the word threat means.
- Amadou 13y agoI 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 13y agoI studied Operation Research & Industrial Engineering in college. The rest of the engineering students called ORIE, 'Oh Really It's Engineering?'
- hencq 13y agoHa, same here. They called it a course instead of a degree here. Then again we had dismissive nicknames for practically any field I think.
- philip1209 13y agoI 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 13y agoI 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...
- eru 13y agoI only did the intense mathematical part (as part of math studies). It's fun.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoOf 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.
- venomsnake 13y agoAt one time there were also semi regular human visits to the moon and USA launched stuff into space that is almost outside the solar system now and still working :) The social fabric is a valuable resource ... too bad that it is near depletion in the world.
- abtinf 13y agoOf 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?Docid=203 http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc... 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
- consultant23522 13y agoA better estimate would be percentage of GDP.
- potatolicious 13y agoWouldn'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.
- venomsnake 13y agoHmm 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoWell, 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.
- smackfu 13y agoEfficiency 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.
- sp332 13y ago"Kaizen" is a process for improving your process. It enforces a feedback loop where anyone can point out an issue, instead of having policy dictated unilaterally by experts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System#Continuously_solving_root_problems_drives_organizational_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System#Conti...
- saosebastiao 13y agoExpertise 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 13y agoSometimes, 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 13y ago"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.
- hencq 13y agoAs 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.
- mratzloff 13y agoThis 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 13y agoThe 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 13y agoThat was my interpretation too. This may have been motivated as PR for Toyata's efficiency consulting arm.
- nathanb 13y agoOne 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.
- ecoffey 13y agoIt would also probably help you feel more confident when interviewing for jobs. You know you have valuable skills that can make a difference to an organization
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- huherto 13y agoThis is one of those little gems that you sometimes find in HN. It is not a world changing idea but it can really make a difference in people that are struggling to find a job. It would be very interesting to see a list of things that people have built or done just to learn and show up their work in different professions.
- nknighthb 13y agoI'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!
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- knowaveragejoe 13y agoIt'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...
- rescripting 13y agoI 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.
- kmfrk 13y agoIn San Francisco, not well. I can't submit both BuzzFeed and the Gawker network's stories, because pg blocks them, but you can google "Twitter + Charity + tax cut" and see the stories.
- dpe82 13y agoThey should be able to declare an in-kind contribution at some reasonable hourly rate for the engineers' time.
- jaggederest 13y agoUsually doesn't work that way, unfortunately. I can't donate my time through LLC and get a tax break, at least.
- huherto 13y agoI am not an accountant. But the labor cost would be payed by the company and handled as a regular expense, indirectly reducing profits and taxes.
- caycep 13y agoIn the country of Henry Ford, it's sad that it took Toyota to do this.
- snambi 13y agoToyota is the Ford of the world lately.
- caycep 13y agoTrue. 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 13y agoThis 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.
- thisjustinm 13y agoI 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.
- motters 13y agoThis 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.
- LockeWatts 13y agoI'm not sure that falls to Toyota to do, though. I would commend them for what they have done, that's a large and direct improvement to the lives of the needy. Just throwing money at the problem rarely results in the same.
- echohack 13y agoI don't think anyone here will disagree with you that the large problem of hunger is a problem and should be solved. But how can you solve it? That's a huge problem! In engineering, and particularly with software, we seek to answer the small questions until we build a robust system.
- Dylan16807 13y agoWhat'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 13y agoI 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.
- twentysix 13y agoRelated : 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.
- legulere 13y agoThe 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.
- gashad 13y ago> "... [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 13y agoDefinitely by design. They want to keep you in there shopping as long as they can so that hopefully you will buy more.
- pgeorgi 13y agoIt's by design to provide as much exhibition space as possible. At least in the Ikea stores in my region they started to provide shortcuts. When using all of them, it's hardly 5 minutes to get through the entire shop from entry to cashier, where it otherwise takes half an hour. (but then you see practically nothing).
- vanderZwan 13y agoTo quote this little gem from Ghostbusters: "I've worked in the private sector... they expect results!" - Ray Stantz
- NickM 13y agoThis 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!
- imran 13y agoWondering what Bill Gates and Warren Buffet could offer to the community (kaizen up!)
- dwaltrip 13y agoThis 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.
- dorian-graph 13y agoIt'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/).