Food bank update

[Jim Walker <w.james.walker@sympatico.ca>]

A while ago I was encouraged to read The Toyota Way. This 
recommendation was in response to my asking about a single supplier for 
our food bank. The Toyota Way goes far beyond talking simply about 
single suppliers. Having understood the book's principals pretty 
quickly (long-term Deming lurker, you know) I immediately designed a 
better way of picking parts at my workplace. We would use bins and one 
piece flow and all that sort of thing.

Management was pitched the idea complete with my two week analytical 
run charts and…they didn't see any reason to change. I chose not to 
work there soon after. (It's great being a temp. worker!) My new-found 
freedom affords me more time to continue with the food bank project.

I have the food bank Work Breakdown Structure in place, a critical path 
established and lots of systems-thinking processes. Deming's PDSA has 
been expanded a bit to become "Research, Design, Publish, Implement and 
Evaluate". Systems are being designed to respond to change. Committees 
will change members and focus. Communication links will change. And we 
will have a plan in place to make sure Joe Grotz's new email address 
gets sent out to everybody.

Thanks to to Liker, author of The Toyota Way, I am now even more aware 
of waste in its various forms. And the notion of evaluation continues 
to be important. We're going to actually watch repeatedly as bins of 
non-perishables are being offloaded. Then we're going to get into a 
scrum and figure out how to do it even better.

I'm having a blast. The people who need to approve our overall plan are 
on the cusp of saying 'yes', I have the 14 Food Bank Systems ready to 
be developed and I'm writing all this down in order to publish the 
details of this adventure.

SIx sigma? Not quite yet.

 ISO 9000? Heck, you know what ISO 9000 is - it's a record of how you 
are making mistakes, predictably.

- Jim Walker