Intel Volunteers Apply Lean Principles to Food Bank

By Jon Miller Published on January 22nd, 2011

My friend Kevin Meyer of Superfactory shared a great example of lean principles being applied beyond manufacturing to help a non-profit organization become more productive in serving the needs of the community. Roadrunner Food Bank puts together packages of food for senior citizens, and when watching this work one of the volunteers from Intel noticed, “This is production.”
The short video above gives a good demonstration of how the team used experimentation to rapidly redesign the process to balance the working time and flow more smoothly, resulting in a 28% improvement in output per hour.
The kaizen spirit is summarized in the realization by one of the Intel volunteers, “If we make a change here, a change there, we could really make it go faster.”

Jon Miller

Jon has dedicated his 25+ year career to the field of kaizen, continuous improvement, and lean management. Jon spent the first eighteen years of his life in Japan, then graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s in linguistics.

Gonzalo Rivero
September 21, 2020 - 11:04 am
Reply

It is a great example of how small changes can make a Great Difference: Time per pantry was reduced from three minutos to about eleven seconds! When they reducedd the Muda -empty space per pantry in a box-, it increassed the possibility of adding and delivering more pantries in the same day, while reducing delivery time from 3:00 hours to only 1:20. Fantastic!