FRISCO, Texas — The City of Frisco has partnered with Toyota to help facilitate the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) is a non-profit affiliated with Toyota that shares its production processes with the outside world. It started working with the City of Frisco in early January, when it became a vaccination hub in Collin County.
"We're used to translating those principles to an non-automotive environment," said Jamie Bonini, vice president of TSSC.
So far, the Frisco site has administered 36,000 vaccines in total. But organizers at the site are more concerned with the efficiency at which they distribute those vaccines.
"This operation is down to the second. Over a period of time, [our processes] just continued to get better and better and better," said Frisco Fire Battalion Chief Jake Owen.
Organizers keep a strict time on how long it takes for a person to move through the line, to get the shot and to get out the door. Toyota and Frisco staff have set a goal of 108 seconds from the time a person leaves the seat of their on-deck waiting chair, to the time they've received the shot and left the table.
For some perspective, it takes Toyota 60 seconds to build one truck.
Organizers expect fluctuations to occur and continue to look for ways to fine-tune their processes. Toyota stresses that it does not rush people through the process. They encourage questions from people receiving the vaccine.
"I absolutely nerd out over this," laughed Anthony Eleazarraraz with TSSC.
"Our job is to eliminate the waste, shrink the non-value-added work, and increase the value-added work," he said.
They went from giving out 100 shots an hour in the beginning of the year to now 400 shots an hour. Bonini and Owen told WFAA the change came from daily review meetings and constant tweaking of the process.
Owen said the hope is for people to be in and out of the vaccine hub in just under 30 minutes. It takes about two minutes to receive vaccine instruction and get the vaccine and 15 minutes after for the evaluation period to ensure no adverse reactions.
That doesn't leave much wiggle room for waste.
"We've translated the Toyota system we used to build cars to a process that is saving lives, and you can't get much more rewarding than that," said Bonini.
The City of Frisco told WFAA that the partnership with Toyota, and specifically TSSC, comes at no cost to the city.
