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Lean Review - Access, Information and Advice
Client: Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea
Project Overview
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s (RBKC) Adult Social Care team needed to reduce the amount of inappropriate referrals currently experienced by the service. To achieve this, the council decided to introduce a new central Access, Information and Advice (AIA) team. The team would need to consist of an innovative mix of Social Workers and Occupational Therapists to allow the service to process cases with low support needs in a quicker, more efficient manner. This would allow the more complex cases to be managed in the locality teams.
CPC’s Role
CPC were commissioned to:
- Analyse and map current processes and identify all areas of waste relating to the existing AIA service.
- Engage with key professionals currently contributing to the customer pathway to ensure that waste identified was validated and that all recommendations for change were agreed.
- Design the AIA’s organisational structure and ensure that it operates with Lean principles
- Provide new, lean (sustainable) processes for the new AIA team, based on the ‘demand pull’ principle of lean.
Client Benefits
RBKC received the following benefits:
- Identified waste in excess of Ł150k p.a., providing a minimum return on investment of 6:1.
- A streamlined customer pathway and much improved customer experience through the utilisation of ‘Kaizan’
- An improved way of working within the Adult Social Care, which focuses on the demand pull principle of lean
- Increased productivity of staff and improved cross-departmental working practices.
- Improved processes will allow customer referrals and assessments to be completed more efficiently whilst simultaneously reducing the volume of inappropriate referrals.
- In the long term, the new team is expected to improve the ratio of non-qualified to qualified social workers and occupational therapists from 3.8:1 to 2:1
