Authority #6

West London (2)

6 Areas of Improvement

7 Months

1. Transformation through HR
Scope: Restructure highways teams to reduce overhead by £150K. SSD enabled over £1M savings in this project, while simultaneously increasing the quantity of work carried out, the speed of work designed, consulted on and completed. This reduced insurance costs, accidents, claims and repairs. we enabled renewed trust and the re-commencement of urgently needed repairs and upgrades of the highway fabric, creating a new single structure with work flows that reduced total work inputs by an avg. factor of three.

2. Section 58 trips and falls
Scope: Redesign services to reduce costs. SSD redesigned systems to utilise existing ICT, linking three systems together to stop the use of two needless duplicated systems. We enabled data linkages and information creation unidentified by the incumbent ICT providers. We reduced the time at risk by a factor of three, also resolving several defence issues against claims which would have otherwise been paid. These savings alone covered more than the cost of the entire SSD intervention. Net savings totaled over £350K per annum, mainly through an increase of inspections and a simplified repairs process.

3. Traffic Management Act
Scope: Identify better ways of working to reduce third party issues and increase income. Building on some very good new systems, integrating improved ICT (as above) with better tactical deployment, based on Pareto analysis and probability theory, SSD were able to double net surplus to over £1M.  Enabling increased inspections and reduced traffic disruptions.

4. Planned Maintenance Management
Scope: Develop a team and system to overcome disruptive politics and continue essential works. Political interest was crippling the ability to do any work. Information flow to the cabinet had to be created to enable full member involvement, via informed, value adding opportunities. SSD designed a maintenance ICT model including political priorities which influenced highly technical multi-sensory project aspects. This solution immediately provided access to new approved work plans for all key stakeholders. 

5. Highways design
Scope: Improve capacity and quality of designs. SSD significantly reduced the end to end time for major and minor designs. We reduced 80% of non-engineering work for the Engineers, enabling them to beat targets, by better utilising current ICT, with linked aspects of design. This removed several stages of starting over, accepted as part of the previous process. The team also increased their conscious capacity to design in maintenance and safety issues for the future.

6. ICT Plan recovery
The highways system was massively underused, as was GIS and CRM. The low utilisation of a very capable system had undermined development for many years. Its linkages with GIS were toned down by the systems providers, and it had been programmed to work separately from the call centre CRM. SSD ran workshops which challenged assumptions, disproving internal ‘facts’ that many months and £000's were needed to make a difference.
The database, GIS and CRM were linked via middleware including excel and Crystal Reports, to enable a huge increase in shared information and far better coordination. GIS became the filing system for highways, with sixty layers of position based knowledge. The existing system was fully utilised.