Kaizen with the Scottish Executive

(Scottish Executive 'Scoop' article, 4th quarter 2001)

Zen and the art of correspondence.....

The Business Planning round hit the correspondence unit just like other parts of the Executive. Aware that the Correspondence Unit had to do its bit to make handling of Ministerial Correspondence more efficient and help to meet performance targets set for the Scottish Executive, the staff also knew there were issues preventing them from doing as good a job as they would like.

Their plea for help was answered by Business Development Unit (BDU) colleagues who suggested that they undertake a “Kaizen” event, literally meaning “change for the better”. Kaizen is a process improvement methodology developed by the Japanese car industry and is based upon the elimination of waste within processes. Although not quite wanting to compete with Toyota, they did want to improve and BDU colleagues were convinced that this approach would work well in an administrative area.

What did We do?

A diverse team (independent people, Unit colleagues and other Executive staff) was brought together to focus their collective energy for a week on the Central Correspondence Unit (CCU) processes. Stuart Ross (Ross International) facilitated the whole event, keeping the team aligned to the principles involved.

They learned the principles of Kaizen, examined, measured and timed the current processes and cleared unwanted items — if an item was labelled with a red tag — it went!

By the Wednesday, after much discussion a new correspondence handling process was agreed, desks were re-arranged and furniture moved. Some significant IT problems were solved overnight and the new working process was tried and re-measured.

By the end of the week it was obvious that the job could be done more quickly and with improved quality. Productivity gains in entering mail were around 50% - an unbelievable change in only four days! Freeing up this time meant that the team would now be able to focus on other tasks relating to improvement.

How did we do?

Action Officers, the internal customers, have already noticed some of the effects—most dramatically, the improvement in performance:

• Capability to enter cases increased from 30—50 per day (67% improvement)
• All correspondence allocated within 24 working hours (no cases have taken longer than this since the Kaizen event).
• All signed replies entered on the system within 24 hours of receipt in CCU (again no cases have taken longer than this since the event)
• Letters coming through the Ministerial Correspondence System (MCS) are time stamped so that the target of 24-hour turn around can be measured.
• Responsibility for “cases not yet accessed” within 48 hours now rests with relevant Line Manager and Action Officer.

Additionally there is now a CCU Help-line, which frees other team members to concentrate upon the entering of correspondence and allocation issues. The biggest job to tackle now, with work ongoing with the Justice Department as a pilot, is to aim for a 95% success rate in allocations.