IRRV - Insight January 2009

Introduction

Revenues and Benefits Services of Local Authorities have been at the forefront of public sector’s drive to use technology to reduce costs and improve quality of service. Today the vast majority of these Services use modern transactional systems, document management, workflow, citizen relationship management, telephony and web-based technology to improve service delivery.

On their own these systems can only provide incremental improvements to performance but if they are used to support new ways of working they have the potential to radically reduce costs and improve customer service.

Unfortunately many services have only scratched the surface in terms of the improvements possible. The good news is that this means that the bulk of the investment has been made and with relatively little extra outlay they can make significant performance gains.

Deciding to change

Wealden District Council had been using a Document Image Processing (DIP) and Workflow system for over five years but had not been taking full advantage of the technology. Many processes were still paper based with the DIP system used predominately to archive completed work; other processes supported by the system required redesign before they could take full advantage of its capabilities.

Fortunately the ability and attitude of staff within the service more than made up for these problems and Wealden Benefits Service was performing well. Nevertheless the management at Wealden believed that ‘the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining’.

What is possible

Wealden District Council brought in Business Process Management experts to help them understand best practice in using DIP workflow systems. Wealden were specifically interested how DIP workflow systems could support a move towards a more ‘hands-off’ management style.

Helen Steele, Operations Manager, explains, “Our supervisors were overly involved in the detail of processing and this meant they did not have time to step back and look at whether how we worked could be improved or effectively monitor how staff were performing. We wanted a system which would automate repetitive tasks for assessors, allocate work to staff according to our processing priorities and give our supervisors the time and the information they needed to identify how the service could be improved”.

First steps down the road

Before Wealden could reach this goal they had to address the length of time it was taking documents to be scanned into the system - in some cases as long as a week. Duncan Baxter, a consultant advising Wealden noted, “If a document management system is going to be used as anything more than an archiving tool all documents must be scanned and indexed on the day of receipt. The system cannot manage work items or collect processing information if they are not on the system”.

Delays in entering documents causes other problems to: Do assessors risk sending reminders out for information which they may have received? Do they delay processing just in case extra information has arrived? Do they bypass the DIP workflow system altogether and search through paper correspondence? All of this generates extra work and increases turnaround times for work items which in turn can cause an increase in enquiries from claimants and the possibility of overpayments.

Wealden formed a project team consisting of a mix of staff and external consultants to overhaul the scanning and indexing process so that same day processing would be achieved.

A number of key recommendations were made including ensuring mail arrived in the Benefits Service earlier in the day, reducing the volume of documents which need to be processed and automating processing. However the biggest change was to how the processing was carried out and the spirit it was done in.

As Wealden were relying on paper based processing for much of their work there was little urgency attached to the scanning and the work was carried out by individuals in a piecemeal fashion throughout the day. Now that has changed; the project team has redesigned the process to enable staff to work seamlessly together and an improvement plan with clear targets has been agreed with the team leader.

As Helen notes, “More than anything we wanted to engender a ‘can do’ spirit within the scanning and indexing team so that they became self-motivated to do things faster and better. Everyone in the team knows that management view their job as essential and the performance of this team directly touches everything we do”.

The results speak for themselves; inside a month the number of documents scanned in the same day increased from 25% to 80% and now, six weeks later the team is closing in on a 100% target. This is already improving the performance of the rest of the service and, critically, staff now know that the information in the system is up-to-date – laying the foundation for the rest of the project.

Four pointers to success

Prioritise	Rather than try and improve the service is one go, Wealden picked a process where improvement would be felt throughout the service and laid the foundation for the next steps in the project
Ownership	Some processing delays were caused by another department but the team still addressed them as the impact was affecting their Service’s performance
Streamline	By doing things differently Wealden radically reduced the amount of effort required to complete scanning and indexing
Culture	Scanning and Indexing staff now know that management view their work as vital. This has created a culture which will ensure the team will continue to improve performance.