Local government has always had a tough time delivering the services demanded by citizens within the constraints of relatively low tax collections rates in Louisiana. And with the economic downturn adversely affecting sales tax collections and other sources of revenue, local communities must turn to other means to maintain service levels to meet constituent demands. That’s where governments can take a playbook from the business world, and begin eliminating waste to improve performance and crunch service delivery times.
This waste is inherent in almost every organization – from non-profits to businesses to government. The wastes are time spent by personnel doing things that aren’t necessary to deliver the service being requested. By eliminating these wastes, government can speed permit review times, road repair response times, maintenance activities, and even emergency response times.
In the business world, the elimination of these wastes is called “Lean Thinking”. It’s what put Toyota, Honda, and many other Japanese companies on the map. Health care facilities are rapidly adopting Lean principles to the time it takes for incoming patients to receive lifesaving treatment.
In Lean, there are eight wastes: waiting, excess inventory, non-value-added processing, transportation of materials and equipment, motion, mistakes, over-production and underutilized people.
The key to removing these wastes are in looking for them – and they’re right before your eyes:
Watching a Xerox machine run (underutilized people); asking for information (waiting); making more forms than necessary (excess inventory); moving documents over long distances (transportation); storing processed documents (overproduction); rework (mistakes); and redundant checking (non-value-added processing). Do some of these look familiar?
Corinne Dupuy, director of the Center for Lean Excellence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette says the time involved in almost any process can be dramatically reduced, quality of service improved, and overall costs reduced. With the backing of the university and Louisiana Economic Development, the center was created to focus on using Lean techniques to transform Louisiana’s public and private sectors. The Center applies the tried and true principles that made Toyota and Honda what they are today: start at the top, train your people in the basics, use some high-level tools to identify your pilot areas, then work with your employees to eliminate the wastes and make your constituents more satisfied.
Louisiana communities must improve their quality of services. In the current environment, tax increases to fund improved services will be hard to come by. So, as an elected official or administrator, you’re faced with improving services by hiring additional people, making existing employees work longer hours, or buying new equipment; all of which cost extra money that you don’t have. Or, you could work smarter, not harder, by using the principles of Lean to make your community a better place.
