WSU Business Students Help Food Bank Operate More Efficiently
OGDEN, Utah – The holiday season is one of the busiest times of year for Catholic Community Services, Joyce Hansen Hall Food Bank. Thanks to a partnership with supply chain management students from Weber State University’s John B. Goddard School of Business & Economics, the food bank is operating more efficiently this holiday season.
Supply chain management students in assistant professor Sebastian Brockhaus’ courses have been working with Catholic Community Services (CCS) for the past three semesters to identify ways to help improve the nonprofit’s processes.
“In supply chain management, the goal is to build an organization that can meet the needs of the customer at the lowest possible cost and avoid everything that doesn’t create customer value. We help organizations do the good things they already do better,” Brockhaus said.
“We used to be open from noon to 2 p.m., and clients would be lining up at 9 a.m. and waiting four or five hours,” said Marcie Valdez, CCS Northern Utah Director.
Students in Brockhaus’ classes spent two semesters gathering data and interviewing clients. In spring 2015, the students recommended that the food bank open from 9 a.m. to noon daily, and one night a month, to better meet clients’ needs.
Valdez said that since implementing the new hours of operation in September, client wait times have decreased significantly. Clients now arrive at staggered times, reducing the amount of time it takes the food bank to serve them.
Brockhaus said that during fall 2014, the first semester his students worked with Catholic Community Services, the focus involved building trust.
“Personnel were initially apprehensive about taking a business approach to their operation,” said Brockhaus. “They would say, ‘We help people,’ and I’d respond, ‘Well our goal is to see if we can find ways for you to help people, while being more efficient.’ Once they saw what we could do, they warmed up to having us more involved in assessing efficiencies.”
Recognizing that people tend to be resistant to change, Valdez said it was important to have numbers, graphs and data to back up the decision to change operating hours. “The data helped us show we were listening to what our clients told us. We weren’t picking these hours arbitrarily,” Valdez said.
“So much of what we do is modeled after business, especially warehousing,” said Valdez. “I tell Sebastian all the time, I’m a social worker, I don’t have training in how to manage a warehouse. It’s great to find expertise in the community. The fresh sets of eyes, new ideas and fresh perspectives the students bring are amazing.”
Brockhaus admits working with nonprofits is not without its challenges.
“When we work with a client from industry and we ask for certain information, the company immediately understands what we want and need,” Brockhaus said. “Our students work with optimizing spread sheets. It’s key that the nonprofit already have existing data, otherwise the process of collecting data typically takes too long for students to accomplish in one semester. Catholic Community Services of Northern Utah was an ideal partner because it already had data collected.”
For senior Jacky Torres, a supply chain management major in Brockhaus’ class, this was the first time one of her classes included an opportunity to work with a community partner. The Austin, Texas, native said working with CCS allowed her and three peers to apply what they learned throughout class in a real-world setting.
This semester the students examined ways to improve the flow of shoppers through the pantry to eliminate delays and backups.
“I went to the food bank while people were shopping and timed how long it took at each station – which stations took the longest,” Torres said. “The goal was to identify the bottlenecks in the flow of shoppers. We also noticed shoppers having to turn around their shopping carts a lot because the walkways are narrow, making it hard for people to go through.”
Based on the findings, Torres and her team will recommend changes in the layout of the shopping area, as well as changing the order of the stations by directing customers to start at the ones that take longer, such as the meat station.
The student group also worked with CCS’s Bridging the Gap outreach program, which delivers food packages to five low-income schools every Friday so children won’t go hungry over the weekend. The supply chain management students were trying to help the program forecast how much food to deliver, reducing the amount of items that needed to be restocked.
“The Bridging the Gaps program manager was able to email existing data to us, and we put it into Excel and made graphs and forecast how much he should take out to the schools,” Torres said.
Her group has created an executive summary and data file with recommendations, which they plan to give to CCS.
Over the span of three semesters, a total of 12 supply chain management students from Brockhaus’ courses have worked with CCS of Northern Utah.
This isn’t the first time WSU students have assisted CCS. Students in Richard Fry’s computer science courses helped install an inventory database back in 2013.
Valdez estimates CSS benefits from more than 100 WSU student volunteers a semester, and that number is growing. “Any day you come to Catholic Community Services, you’ll find a Weber State student helping,” Valdez said.
“Seeing the issues in a real-world setting makes it a lot easier to understand what the teachers are referring to in class,” Torres said. “I really enjoyed it. It was great because I was able to do community service while applying what I was learning in the classroom. It helps students get a better idea of how the business world actually works.”
Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
Visit weber.edu/goddard to learn more about the John B. Goddard School of Business & Economics and the supply chain management program.
John Kowalewski, director of Marketing & Communications
801-626-7212 • jkowalewski@weber.edu- Contact:
Sebastian Brockhaus, assistant supply chain management professor
sbrockhaus@weber.eduJacky Torres, supply chain management student
jacquelinetorres@mail.weber.eduMarcie Valdez, CCS Northern Utah Director
801-428-1294 • mvaldez@ccsutah.org