Happier staff and customers as Cumbria Police increase their capacity
Local Authorities
Results & ROI
When fully implemented, we expect to see:
- An increase in capacity through removing; the manual sickness process (35 days pa), Motion (16 days pa), Manual filing (24 days pa), Training admin forms (53 days pa) Multiple, manual training records (32 days pa)
- Time spent on monthly establishment reporting reduced by at least 75%
- Cycle time reduced from 6 days to 24 hours when receiving approval of change to making changes on system
The Client
The Central Services Department (CSD) at Cumbria Constabulary was established to bring together a number of administrative support functions across departments, into one team. Since the inception of CSD, administration and support process have been under regular review. We were asked to build on process mapping work already undertaken by the internal Corporate Improvement (CI) team.
The Challenge
Whilst CSD were performing well against self-set KPIs, it was clear that inefficiencies remained in some processes, specifically the CI review identified these as being the Procure to Pay, Establishment, Payroll and Training Administration processes – they became known as the ‘The Big Four’. All of these require input from, or pass an output to, other teams across the organisation.
The Big Four processes were the focus of the Ad Esse-led review – looking at them from an end-to-end perspective, with the aim of redesigning fit-for-purpose processes.
The Approach
To understand how each of the ‘Big Four’ processes were currently working, we undertook various Lean diagnostic activities. This included one-to-one interviews with staff, data collection and analysis, observation of staff in the workplace – known as Day-in-the-Life-of (DILO) activity and Value Stream Mapping (VSM).
The overall findings were:
- Waiting for perfection rather than continuous improvement
- Lack of trust in information held in systems
- Over-reliance on paper documents
- Over-processing and silo-working
- Unclear roles and responsibilities
Mapping workshops were then held to allow staff to design a new process, and a walk-through of this was held to ensure all issues had been eliminated. An implementation plan was drawn up and Information centres set up agreed along with measures to enable the team to understand how the ‘Big Four’ processes were performing.
The Benefits
In addition to the key ROI benefits, the team also gained:
- More efficient use of resource by removing duplication in processes
- Improved performance of processes that rely on up-to-date information in the  system
- Reduction in errors, and associated Failure Demand, by getting information right at the start of the process through error-proofed electronic forms
- Improved visibility of work in progress – improved capacity planning and reduced need for fire-fighting
- Improved communication, collaboration and trust between teams through Information Centres
- Staff able to identify improvements and implement them in the future.