Now the recession  is putting added pressure on local authority budgets and at the same time is having a marked effect on demand for services. Some services are much less in demand, others much more. Can BPR or allied techniques such as Lean Working help you and your colleagues deliver more for less?

Business Process Re-engineering
BPR involves numerous components and stages, all of which are essential to the end result - achieving change within the service concerned. A structured methodology is therefore important, to ensure that all issues are appropriately addressed. An incomplete approach results in unwanted outcomes.

The key elements of our approach are:

• Where are we now? Identifying and communicating with stakeholders, mapping current processes, performance assessment
• What are we striving for? Identifying the business vision, options appraisal, refining proposals, mapping future processes
• Making it happen. Planning change, making the business case, planning communications, resourcing the programme, making the changes, reviewing the programme and documenting the new processes as implemented.
• Continuous improvement. It is vital to establish a culture of continuous improvement, so process owners ar e continually looking for opportunities to improve and develop the service. Formalise this through regular reviews and by training staff in the techniques of evaluation, mapping, assessment, and change management.

Process mapping
Process Mapping is an essential element in BPR: analysing current processes in service delivery, ways in which they could be improved, and the key stakeholders who need to understand and put those changes into practice.

However, the public sector's renewed interest in BPR and Process Mapping has drawn suppliers of very complex Process Mapping toolsets into the market. Most such tools are over-engineered for public sector use, costly, and work against standardisation - whereas other, simpler toolsets can exploit the growing standard libraries of process maps developed by other public sector organisations.

Our approach is to:

• Ensure the client is clear about the reasons for doing process mapping
• Use the most appropriate tools for the job - being understandable to the people involved in the process is the most important criterion, and where applicable, being able to provide the structured information needed by the IT people a close second
• Keep it simple - use the simplest tool consistent with what is required - and focus on understanding the process rather than on learning a new tool; once a process is understood, it can be represented easily in any representational tool
• Not to be distracted by technology - avoiding the client adopting a product that no-one else is using; encourage standards and products that are in widespread use, so that the work can be shared with others.

Lean Working
Many organisations prefer a more direct approach to cutting waste in processes and find Lean Working a valuable technique which can produce rapid results. The Lean approach is simple in concept – it is about removing waste from established processes in order to make them efficient and effective, not simply ‘cutting costs’, though that is often a result.

The main focus of Lean Working is on delivering what the customer wants when the customer wants it and in the most efficient way – cutting away unnecessary forms, processing and approvals, for example, but possibly adding extra steps where these can add value, say by reducing errors. As the recession bites, some local authority customer services are over-resourced and others under-resourced. Lean Working can help sharpen the focus on how to resolve this.

The best way of introducing Lean Working is via a workshop, helping the staff who will be responsible for implementing lean working to identify examples of waste, understand key factors that produce high performance and analyse how to improve an existing process in their own organisation. This can have a dramatic effect on in both motivating employees to drive through improvement and in creating a process improvement culture and signposting how improvement can be achieved.

If you would like to discuss how we may be able to help you in these areas, please call us on 0845 450 0904, email info@socitmconsulting.co.uk or use our online enquiry form.