Baker Victory Services
Baker Victory Services (BVS) of Lackawanna, NY, provides educational, outpatient and residential programs to children, youth and families. Among its “feel-good” programs is a café business, where developmentally disabled and/or at-risk youth prepare and serve lunch to BVS employees at two sites. Vice President of Developmental Disabilities Susan Mentecki had difficulty understanding why the cafés consistently lose about $2,000 monthly. The Certified Lean Professional program guided Mentecki and her team through unearthing and rectifying four dominant operational issues blocking financial progress and, more importantly, impeding quick service. Their waste-reducing Lean project is not only improving lunch services by providing tools to better support student performance, but has facilitated work skill training curriculum that will be marketed to area school districts. Additionally, a new enthusiasm has been provoked as BVS embraces Lean to improve other components of the overarching WAY (Work Appreciation for Youth) program.
Employed the Lean methodology by:
- Mining data to determine low-performing to best-selling food items
- Completing a Gemba walk to pinpoint inefficiencies and logjams
- Conducting a detailed inventory to realize that supplies were being over-ordered and unnecessary, outdated materials were cluttering storage
- Undertaking a customer satisfaction data analysis to identify improvement opportunities
- Projected $25,044 in annual savings by operating at zero loss
- Boosted student confidence by integrating curriculum, creating simpler order forms and visuals to show where everything is stored, and implementing color coding
- Placed BVS in good positioning for a renovation that will transform one kitchen site to a true training center
- Decreased time to generate an order from three minutes to 30 seconds
- More than halved the time it takes to locate supplies
- Devised a new purchasing system that eliminates over-ordering but still maintains a shipping price break
Project ROI
How do we measure the impact of projects? It’s a mix of tangible, quantifiable savings with the more elusive “soft savings” – such as cost avoidance and improved customer satisfaction.