A local government legal team realised an extra 30% capacity

Background

As in many public sector organisations, the length of time from an individual requesting a new supplier contract and the actual supplier signing the contract, there was a significant waiting period for all involved parties.

Council employees described their instructions for a new contract to perceivably ‘disappear into a black hole’ until they were chased. Common end-to-end times experienced were over 3 months delaying projects and new service deliveries as suppliers were still not given the go-ahead until all legal work had been completed.

Approach

To understand the end-to-end process, a Reinvigoration consultant decided that it was first necessary to map and analyse all the current processes from when a client in the council requests a new contract to the supplier having the go-ahead to be placed onto the financial database. This was done alongside the Senior Contracts Lawyer to ensure buy-in and knowledge transfer of the techniques used.

Some of the findings of this activity included:

• High waiting periods between processes due to no (first in first out) FIFO & high levels of batching at various stages of the process
• 20% of lawyer’s time taken engaged in work which could be carried out by non-legally trained resource
• 99% of the original client notification forms error free causing extensive chasing for information from lawyers
• 4 forms in total to be filled out internally as case progresses through the process
• High levels of walking between process, each case will be walked over 1 mile even though each office is on the same floor

Implementation Actions Included

• Combining the 4 forms into one. (Most the information was duplicated and some not even required)
• Integrated admin support into the contracts lawyer’s team to encourage one piece flow and allow only minimal transportation of files between offices
• A visual system to ensure FIFO policy of all paperwork is achieved
• Elimination of 25% of process steps (non-value added)
• 4 forms in total to be filled out internally as case progresses through the process
• Visual control of all contracts in progress displaying the status of each contract (Red, Amber, Green) and actions against each

Results

The results of the project were significant with:

• Creation of extra 30% capacity in lawyer resource for realisation or redeployment
• End-to-end times of contract creation down to 5 weeks
• Significant improvement in satisfaction scores from legal services clients
• Only 5% errors in forms occurred meaning significant reduction in chase calls