Simplify Business Processes

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

The procurement function of a large London local authority, as with many public sector organisations, found the length of time from the request for a new supplier contract to the supplier signing the contract included unacceptable waiting period for all the parties involved.

Council employees described their instructions for a new supplier contract to ‘disappearing 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.

To understand the end-to-end process, it was first necessary for Reinvigoration 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 in conjunction with the Senior Contracts Lawyer to ensure buy-in and knowledge transfer of the techniques used. Some of the key findings of this activity included:

• High waiting periods between processes due to no FIFO (first in first out) and high levels of batching at various stages of the process
• 20% of the lawyer’s time was engaged in work which could be carried out by non-legally trained resource
• 99% of the original client notification forms included errors, causing extensive chasing for information from the lawyers
• 4 forms in total had to be completed internally as each case progressed through the process
• High levels of walking took place between process with each case being walked over 1 mile even though all the offices were on the same floor

Reinvigoration implemented a range of actions including –

• Combining the 4 forms into one as much of the information was duplicated and some was not even required
• Administration support was integrated 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 was achieved
• Elimination of 25% of process steps (non-value added)
• Visual control of all contracts in progress displaying the status of each contract (Red, Amber, Green) and actions against each

The positive results of the project were significant with:

• The creation of an extra 30% capacity in lawyer resource for realisation or redeployment
• End-to-end times of contract creation down to 5 weeks from 13 weeks
• A significant improvement in satisfaction scores from legal services clients
• Only 5% errors in forms occurred meaning significant reduction in chase calls

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