APPLYING LEAN TO GOVERNMENT SERVICES
Lean Federal Government
Lean Government means doing more with less. Less delays, less spending, less resources, less talking and more action, unleashing the power of attrition. Lean Breakthru Systems is a proprietary approach to Lean Government that is intolerant of waste while continuing to reduce the need for Government Services.
Lean Government applies to all agencies within the Government. From reducing the time to receive a tax refund to reducing the need for disaster assistance. From SBA, FEMA to TSA and DOD, Lean principles offer the breakthrough strategies to limit the size of our Government, reducing spending without the fear of negatively impacting next year's budget.
Lean Government is the relentless pursuit of waste elimination in performing Government Services
Government agencies and commercial businesses strive for better organizational performance, streamlined processes, and customer-focused services with lower costs.
Today's defense organizations — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, DOD — face staggering increases in manpower requirements while at the same time being forced to reduce head counts. The idea of creating an organization that can meet these challenges without negatively impacting response times or quality seems to good to be true. We know more funding is not the answer. We need to do more, faster, with less.
Government agencies like the USAF and Navy have taken and applied lessons learned from the private sector. In the last ten years many companies in the private sector have been successfully applying Lean Principles. Lean is a term defined by Dr. James Womack after an extensive review of what Toyota Motor Company (TMC) has been doing over the last 55 yrs. Dr. Womack noted the overwhelming theme was more with less. Less labor, less lead-time, less defects, less space, less delays. They had developed a Lean enterprise.
The USAF has institutionalized Lean by creating a dedicated collection of change agents known as the "Transformation Group" to lead their improvement efforts enterprise wide. The Navy has been on its Lean journey by creating the "Lean Task Force Initiative".
Why change? Both civil and defense are now being held up to much higher breakthrough standards of efficiency. Increasing speed of execution while reducing costs requires higher standards for consistency. Higher standards will force the adoption of breakthrough strategies.
Lean State Government
Applying Lean to State & County Government Services
Examples of Lean County/State Government include:
1. Reducing the budget by $100M by improving productivity and unleashing the power of attrition.
2. Improving the response of the Department of Natural Resources by reducing the time to approve funding for waste water treatment facilities
3. Reducing the time to approve water treatment facilities
4. Reduce the time and effort in the finance department by challenging ever step in the bond process.
5. Establishing standard operations to guarantee each community can meet budget challenges by following the best practices.
Lean City Government
Applying Lean to City Government Services
The state of Florida has a problem similar to other states. The 2007 housing market slump caused a reduction in property tax revenues that can still be felt today. When the tax payers in Florida here that property taxes will be lowered we don't feel the shockwave of fear going through city and local governments. Each of the local governments believe that cuts in budgets will lead directly to reducing police and firefighting personnel. So, how do you deal with the impending crisis of drastically reduced budgets? Be proactive. Florida cities have taken proven commercial practices (Lean Enterprise implementation) and been applying Lean Government System principles to improve issues in each of the city value streams (departments).
City Government Transformation Examples include:
Maintaining the same level of city government employee/budget while the city population grows more than 30 percent over a seven year period.
PLANNING/PERMITTING - Reduce the time to approve commercial site permits from 27days first review to less than 5days with no more than two toal submittals with less resources. Plan on completing comercial site reviews in 4hrs.
CODE ENFORCEMENT - Reduce the time to be in code compliance from 57days to less than 14days, establish a system to expose problems and take corrective actions daily
FINANCE - Reduce the number of purchase orders from over 7000/yr to under 2500/yr and the time to approve a purchase order from 6days to less than 1-day. Reduce the time to complete the accounts payable process by challenging ever step in the process. Improve productivity by 25-50% and use freed-up resources to work on other projects.
HR DEPARTMENT - Reduce the time to place fire and police personnel from +60days to under 30days including providing a two week notice.
PUBLIC WORKS - Reduce city backlog projects from 2years to complete drainage swales to less than 6months without adding additional resources.
POLICE - The opportunity for improvement in each department are endless, from processing traffic tickets to completing daily reports. The city of Jacksonville Florda has combined city and municipal governments to improve communication and reduce the cost of public safety.
FIRE - Improve response to the community by evaluating the majority of service calls, typically 80 percent of the calls are health related. What resources show up at a health related service call? Are you able to transport the patient using fire department vehicles.