Expertise doesn't have to be situational or contextual. Soup kitchen operations can benefit from operations experts, even if they have no experience with the soup kitchen context. They do this using the same tool that programmers use to model the world: abstraction.
Sometimes, yes, but as things get more complex, operations experts do tend to get more specialized. If you took some logistics engineers from Amazon and Exxon and had them swap places, they wouldn't be able to immediately do the same job, though if they're good they should certainly be able to learn the new context.
"If they're good" is a pretty vague qualifier. They aren't an expert if they aren't good, wouldn't you say?
Amazon hires plenty of Industrial Engineers, Ops Researchers, Business Intelligence Engineers, etc. from completely different contexts. My coworker and I were both recruited away from the same company, which was in a very specialized manufacturing company (making adhesives and labels). Learning how to use the internal tools was a lot harder than adapting to a completely new context, because expertise can apply easily to new contexts through appropriate abstraction.
I mostly know about shipping and petrochemicals, which are at least somewhat specialized, so I could be wrong about other areas. I personally wish everything were more abstracted, because in applied AI work (my area) the lack of uniform abstractions where we can just drop in off the shelf stuff to solve a company's problem is a big issue!
It's not so much that the techniques are completely different, as that people who work in the area use a set of abstractions built for that area, and are expected to know those particular abstractions, along with the terminology, typical practices, and constraints on why things are done a certain way. Maersk logistics engineers have a set of approaches built up over the years relating to the economic, legal, and technical context of shipping, for example; there's a whole pile of domain knowledge there, in addition to the general knowledge.
In petrochemicals some chemical-engineering experience is often preferred as well, since optimizing a refinery complex doesn't always break down cleanly between logistics and process-engineering specialties, so you often want people with backgrounds in both.
Valid point but given the context, going from zero to some generic application of scientific resource management will definitely have a profound effect.
This isn't Amazon trying to move from 92% efficiency to 93% which probably is extremely difficult, this is a charity that probably never thought about these things seriously having folks who look for efficiencies being brought in.
