Authority #3 |
North West |
9 Areas of Improvement |
6 month Intervention |
£2M Savings - Year 1
1. Capacity Management |
A Corporate director had 'forced the pace' of change by reducing headcount by 15%, issuing instruction to improve efficiency to also improve service delivery following the cuts. Morale was rock bottom while the capacity to cope was low and the available resource to 'analyse and improve' even lower.
A number of development opportunities had become 'issues' over the previous 5 years. In a set of intense sessions all issues were resolved, in many cases in a matter of hours, including GIS system links, voice recordings for S58 claims and various other 'dynamic linking' activities. |
2. Highways Design |
'Full Scope' process review conducted in Highways Design from survey and Capital Planning to Post construction.
A twist to the Deming PDCA model saw a disenfranchised management team engage under a Plan - Design - Construct - Appraise model. This manipulation of the model allowed them to remain connected to their Civil Engineering roots, allowing them to imagine the remainder of the Authority (practicing pure PDCA) were 'mirroring' their innovation. Waste elimination including the elimination of large 'chunks' of re-work reduced design time and design cost by 25%, |
3. Highways trips and falls |
Address an S58 Claim and claim payment reduction target of £25K / annum.
6 district areas had 6 different ways of working. Following some simplification work we were able to facilitate a move from 23 people to 2.5 FTE's as a trial. This worked, acheiving the following improvements; Claim review and report costs reduced from £300K to £67K (£233K Saved) | Report time reduction from 90 days to 2.67 days (avg.) | zero reporting accuracy to 100% accurate reports 'over-night'. The solution was adopted across all 6 district areas. |
4. Highways NRSWA management |
Improve the control of works carried out by other agencies (Gas / Electrics etc.) There was a failure to acknowledge £6K a day fines repeating throughout the year. Those involved had also failed to identify NRSWA issues as the major cause behind S58 claims. Major changes were introduced to link to S58, improve highway repairs and increase fines for non-compliance to standards.
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5. Highways ‘New ways of working’ |
Highways had historically been managed by a wide array of specialist silo's with no co-ordination role overseeing the work carried out. No one who had a 'working knowledge' of the work had access to a 'whole system' view. Massive disconnect issues ensued as standard. Following analysis the interaction points between each specialist function were identified, New 'Ways of Working' (WoW) followed saving £0.5M.
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6. Highways Call Centre |
A new call centre was commissioned to be added to the existing authority HQ
Early inclusion to planning allowed us to influence the design of a new system in which we omitted 'standard' solutions like fault reporting stages and replaced them with GIS location direct to contractor solutions. This delivered >15% savings, improved both customer care and asset management while enabling a follow-on web enabled portal further improving the process and service. |
7. Waste Transfer Notices |
40T weighbridge ticket inaccuracies were taking time and money to enter into different databases separately. We had been asked to investigate and Identify if a 'Lean Systems Thinking' approach could resolve the issue. We considered 'SIPOC' and looked upstream a step. We found the weighbridge could 'print to file' in .XLS format. The databases could 'pull' info from the excel sheet thus eradicating all paperwork and data entry requirements.
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8. Corporate Methodology |
The project management and transformation teams had been duplicating work in parallel roles.
This had been perpetuated for some time by a 'Big 4' consulting firm who were effectively billing 3 days commission for each operable day delivered. SSD implemented a 'joined-up' system and removed the duplication, bureaucracy, costs and enabled faster transformation. |
9. Passenger Transport |
The PT element were doing well utilising their ICT to geed effect. Overall, they were not a problem for the Authority, however, they too had to reduce costs by 15%. SSD helped them link their ICT system to Childrens and (later) adult social care services to be recognised as the best users of that particular ICT in the Britain. >15% savings were realised leading to additional work, designing day centre operational designs.
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SUMMARY - The
initial 15% capacity target was achieved in less than seven months. Benefits
Realisations were less well tracked than later transformations, 15% of costs
across the Directorate was worth over £2M per annum. S58 work delivered around
£1/2M per annum reduced claims, NRSWA was worth a similar saving, PT delivered
savings in excess of £1/2 M the next year, and continued to grow its customer
base with fewer people than originally employed. The design of highways
improved, such that more roads were improved each year than previously planned,
there was not a reduction in budget.