The first thing that we need to be clear about is the purpose of any support service. Frankly (and to be a bit contentious) it is not about the quality of the specialist service being delivered. Yes, that delivered service is the core outcome and those clients being dumped on the service as prison populations explode post riots are important.

However in reality the back office is simply to put in place a foolproof system to make sure any transactional activity in the Service goes from its inception to its conclusion with no errors and minimum cost. Simple?

So what is at the core of what these back office systems in services seek to deliver? If we look beyond the papers, the databases, the reports and the channels of communication we see a constantly shifting number of processes.

These process are all meant to be delivering the service. Any that are not are simply waste.

And the more efficient that process, the less likely there is to be a problem. Of course people may complain about the outcomes of the service, but that’s the always constant subjective issue in local government, especially in crime and disorder issues. You cannot please all of the people all of the time.

That’s where we enter the brave new world of business process engineering and work flow, a drive to work smarter!

A report published in 2010 by Cranfield School of Management in the UKfound that ‘supply chain management’ was represented at senior board level in more than two thirds of Company Boards and has a very high profile. It emphasises the importance of optimising the process that delivers the service to the customer.

The CEO of Unilever has stated that “The supply chain is considered a key driver necessitating a radical shift from cost cutting to value creation.”

It is that introduction of efficiencies that the Probation Service needs to deliver, not as the current desperate cost cutting drive but delivering better value for money.

And the resources to that must stop being ‘consultants’ as of course they are like a drug, the more you use the more you need. Use them to prime the work, and then grow your own. Implant the skills to process map and surface the supply chain to see the ‘as is’ operation. This has to become a core skill set in the Probation Service staff.

And its in giving you those skills that ProcessFlows can excel in doing. Those skills are transferable to every service providers back office, they are all facing the same challenge.

Work Smarter and be paper lite.

But the point is now we all need to look ahead to organisations that are being ‘hollowed out’. Losing knowledge and resources without facing the paradigm shift to be better at processing.

And thats where the whole thrust in 2011/13 will be. To not only re-invent the wheel but to invent a whole new way of ‘wheel less’ service delivery, from merged and slimmed down public sector fragmented client functions and partner organisations.

Cuts of that magnitude are being managed to try and avoid a front line impact, but that will be almost impossible to achieve if the bottom line is what does it cost and do we have to deliver that service?

Its looking at doing more for less and measuring what all those back office processess actually cost, down to the paper, postage and IT. If done inefficiently our existing process becomes the real focus, for without continous improvement we are not delivering what is desperatly needed.

We are facing a once in a generation change in how Local Governmant operates, and at the heart of that is looking at what comes in, what goes out and what the added value of it all is.

BPR and Workflow are where you add value, you make those ‘documents’ and processess as intelligent as possible. You cut over processing and duplication. You make it all SMART and at the end of it you look back at slashed waste and forward to a smooth and efficient organisation.

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” Deming

Its going to be painful but its going to happen, and process flows are full of the skills that support you to do it and not have to re-invent the wheel. And at a price that makes ROI actually achievable within year one!

W. Edwards Deming also said: “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

We are calling it ‘Working Smarter’ to avoid the effect BPR has on management meetings as they sitch off from a jargon overload.

The program link’s nicely with the industrial back ground that gave Business Improvement Training its tool kit.

The particular Programme in use funded from the LSC to deliver an NVQ is designed to make measurable improvements in two Gershon work streams:

Corporate “back office” functions – making the functions more efficient and achieving best practice consistently and rapidly

Productive time – making the process more efficient and developing waste free processes.

This emphasises the value of this field to Local Government and its aims and objective will sound familiar. And as the funding stream ends this July there is a need to keep this investment in capacity going.

1. Improve Organisational Performance
2. Teams identified to analyse and improve key processes
3. By applying lean techniques
4. Utilising the NVQ in Business Improvement Techniques
5. Making measurable improvements of Quality, Cost & Delivery to their own processes

Sustainability
Give a wide understanding of improvement techniques to a critical mass of people

Lean Culture
Focused on reducing; non value added activities, waste and variation
Utilising the Knowledge to repeat the process

So what does Lean do for you?

Focus on improving the end-to-end process
Redesign work to eliminate all forms of waste
Create detailed, standardised processes
Resolve problems by dealing with their root cause

Its a whole life continous improvement journey that will ceate a paradigm shift in your staff and managers, and frankly if you dont explore it, you will not survive the coming storm.

The point is to find new and better ways to do things, not just to consolidate the old ways, for sure.

That’s why we say that Unified Communications is “communications integrated to optimize business processes.” I.e. to optimize how things get done.

One of the most brilliant applications is the Global Crossing use an automated search to find the right, available resource (yes, it uses presence the right way) for customer problem resolution. Result, average of 5 phone callls per trouble ticket down to an average of 0.3 calls per ticket. Labor costs per ticket dropped 75% and customer service response times improved by 80%. Now, that’s optimized!

So, agree with your, “Wherever you can exclude manual human activity from a business process, it becomes more reliable. Whenever you can do this, it frees people up to have more important conversations.” Would add that the process gets more efficient, as well as more reliable.

Good work.