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Lean Review of Adult Social Care Business Unit
Client: Manchester City Council
Project Overview
The Council had recently established the concept of Business Units for provider services that would trade and compete with other providers of Social Care. Although the internal service was widely regarded as the preferred provider of these services, the council were keen to review the Older People, Learning and Physical Disability services within Adult Social Care with the objective to identify areas of waste and ensure that all processes were “Lean”.
CPC’s Role
Building on from the success of CPC’s initial involvement in the creation of a Business Unit, CPC were commissioned to:
- Map current processes and identify areas of waste within the Business Units.
- Engage with all key professionals contributing to the customer pathway to ensure that waste identified was validated and that all recommendations for change were agreed.
- Maximise use of staff and other resources to streamline the customer pathway and improve the customer experience, using both ‘Kaizan’ and ‘step change’ approaches.
- Provide new, lean and sustainable processes, based on the ‘demand pull’ principle of lean.
Manchester Council received the following benefits:
- Waste of over Ł1.1million identified, providing a minimum return on investment of 12:1 for the client.
- A streamlined customer pathway and much improved customer experience; more accurately reflecting the Council’s service values.
- Fully engaged Managers, Co-ordinators, and Support Workers, all of whom are now driving change from within the service.
- Reduced customer waiting times, improved productivity and a ‘road map’ describing how Business Units will be able to increase their capacity in a cost effective manner.
- Evidence-based analysis which identified under-performing functions of the service, ensuring these areas could be reviewed urgently.
- A detailed action plan for implementation including key change tasks for Business Units – linked into an overall lean change programme.
- Recommendations for improvements were rolled out across all services within Adult Social Care where appropriate as examples of best practice, leading to an improve department.
