County Uses Lean Six Sigma

Case_19_Erie_County.pdf

Problem
Erie County, New York is located in the western part of the state and contains the city of Buffalo.  The county borders on the shore of Lake Erie and is home to approximately 1,000,000 residents. In 2007, Erie County was operating under the auspices of an independent control board due to its unsteady fiscal situation.
That situation began to change in November 2007 with the election of Christopher C. Collins as County Executive. He ran for this office as a businessman with the campaign slogan: “Elect a Chief Executive, not a Chief Politician.” He won with 64% of the vote.

Prior to running for elective office, Mr. Collins had 35 years of private-sector business experience where he became very familiar with the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) process improvement methodology. One of his first acts as County Commissioner in 2008 was to bring LSS into all phases of county operations. By doing so, Erie County became the first large county in America to implement LSS. (1)

Approach
Soon after taking office, Mr. Collins appointed an advisory team to bring LSS to Erie County. He also began collaboration with the Center for Industrial Effectiveness at the University at Buffalo (UB). The advisory board contained members from private industry, academia (UB and other higher education institutions) and the American Society for Quality. Some of these individuals had strong LSS experience, and some did not. Mr. Collins also appointed an LSS Black Belt to direct the county’s LSS activities.

Training has been a key part of the LSS effort. By early 2011, more than 250 county employees had received an LSS overview. Ninety-eight had earned Yellow Belt certification; 38, Green Belt certification and six employees had been certified as Black Belts. (2)

Project work has been the key component of LSS implementation. To date, 35 projects have been completed covering many different aspects of county operations from copier/printer cost reduction to mental health services to reducing the number of complaint calls received. Three projects were underway in early 2011. An interesting aspect of project work was introduction of “rapid action projects” in 2010 which allowed workers with simple efficiency issues to quickly streamline the processes involved. (3)

Three projects worthy of special recognition include boosting revenue in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Forestry; better management of fleet equipment in the Department of Public Works and cutting overtime costs in the Department of Social Services.

Concerning the parks project, before 2008, county residents interested in renting a shelter or building at a county park (for a fee) dealt with a lengthy process that had been developed before the advent of societal technology gains and had never been updated to benefit from Internet use. Residents waited an average of 17 days after making a request before they received a permit for use. Reservation requests were subject to documentation contained in several different notebooks and involved a back-and-forth information exchange between the requestor and the department.  This long length of time simply discouraged residents from attempting to make shelter reservations; thereby leading to loss of revenue and substantial underutilization of county resources. An LSS project modernized the rental process.

The equipment management project was started due a lack of information and vehicle sharing between repair facilities, no common procedures, and lax accounting and usage monitoring procedures. An LSS project consolidated repair facilities, reduced reliance on outside vendors, established financial tracking and control procedures and developed a new employee travel policy.

The overtime project was driven by the fact that between 2005 and 2008, overtime hours in the Department of Social Services more than tripled. One of the biggest problems related to the application process for temporary assistance. The LSS project discovered that 137 steps were involved between starting the application to the time the applicant was granted benefits. The complexity of the process was daunting. Improvements were made which included development of new desk aids which contained codes and reference information, better training of community advocates, reducing employee interruptions during case write-ups and changing preparation requirements for meetings with applicants.

Results
The first round of projects which included the three discussed above saved $2.2 million in 2008 and were expected to save $2.0 million more in 2009. Approximately $5.0 million in savings were projected for 2010 resulting from follow-on projects.

For the shelter rental project, reservation time was reduced to four days, on average, and even two days in some cases (76 to 88 percent reductions). Rental revenue was increased by a factor of 2.5 times from 2008 to 2009 ($122,000 growing to $304,000). In difficult economic times, this was an important benefit to the county.
For the fleet management project, the central fleet maintenance center was closed and work distributed to the highway barns. Reliance on outside vendors was reduced to the point that $57,000 was saved during the summer of 2008.

1. •  Efficient Government Through Lean Six Sigma, Center for Industrial Effectiveness, University at Buffalo, November 2009
   •  http://wwww.erie.gov/exec/?reform-government/lean-six-sigma-initiative.html
   • http://wwww.erie.gov/frog_095_exec/?reform-government/lean-six-sigma-initiative.html
   • Efficient Government Through Lean Six Sigma, Center for Industrial Effectiveness, UB, November 2009