Catalyst Consulting’s training and consultancy services have enabled our local authority clients to continue providing an excellent service to the public while saving them time and money.
Below are a selection of case studies from our work with Local Authorities throughout the UK, where we have assisted them with maintaining and improving service levels while at the same time saving budget expenditure.
To find out more about how we help Local Authorities, please contact Martin Brenig-Jones, Managing Director at Catalyst Consulting: mbj@catalystconsulting.co.uk, +44 (0)845 3452282
North Ayrshire Council
North Ayrshire Council’s project focused on providing Occupational Therapy Equipment. This important service was taking too long, as much as a month on average.
Using a series of workshops, process mapping and data collection, the team identified the non-value-add steps, and developed a new streamlined process.
The control stage of the DMAIC process continued after project handover to produce the procedure manual and assess the benefits which are summarised below:
At the recent Scottish Awards for Business Excellence 2015, we are delighted that North Ayrshire Council took the prize for best Lean Six Sigma project. Read our blog post to find out more here.
Hull City Council
The Hull City Council project focused on their Streetscene efforts, specifically trade and domestic waste collection, street cleaning and highway maintenance throughout the year.
Implementing Lean Six Sigma enabled the Council to streamline their organisation, which had undergone four restructures prior to our project with them. An example of their process improvement was the introduction of a recycling collection service, Hull City Council improved recycling rates between 2013-2014 from 18% to 54%.
Working with delegates across different levels of the organisations, our practitioners encouraged cross-deptartmental teamwork within the Authority, enabling a cultural shift to emphasise process improvement as a collaborative effort. The project resulted in a major shift in operational performance, improved levels of outputs and efficiency and £2.6m in staffing costs out of Streetscene.
Catalyst Consulting is also pleased that as a result of their efforts, Hull City Council won the award for Most Improved Team at the Association for Public Service Excellence Awards.
Bolton Council
Bolton Council’s project focused on the IT support team for Adult Services. Beginning in Q2 2011 with our Lean Six Sigma Green Belt programme, council delegates took part in our training to assist with their ongoing efforts to improve processes.
The project included improving the Management of Performance, Complaints Processes – implementing the capacity to investigate social care complaints – and improving the use of the council’s physical resources.
Kent County Council
Kent County Council worked with Catalyst Consulting’s practitioners to deliver training to two teams which were created to make improvements across the organisation. Following their training, the teams successfully tackled their first project: Blue Badge applications and enquiries for disabled parking eligibility.
Their work yielded fantastic measurable results, reducing time and costs required to process and complete Blue Badge enquiries for the council by over 30%.
Essex County Council
Essex County Council worked in partnership with Catalyst this year to deliver a large scale training and coaching Continuous Improvement programme based on Lean Six Sigma.
To date we have trained 48 Green Belts and 120 Yellow Belts on-site at County Hall in Chelmsford with a small number of upgrades to Black Belt through the Catalyst open courses in London.
This is a transformational initiative for Essex, with Catalyst providing training, coaching, guidance on project selection, tracking and delivery as well as project coaching and certification against the rigorous British Quality Foundation (BQF) standard.
Projects are tackling a wide range of improvement areas in important areas including the coroners office administration, facilities management help desks, transport, roads, bus services, Adult community learning as well as internal process streamlining.
Results are already materialising with the overall aim to improve services at a reduced cost within the spending constraints set by government.
