EPA Finds Inefficiencies

Case_11_EPA.pdf

Problem

In December 2008, a team from the EPA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer conducted a Lean improvement project known as a Kaizen event. (Such an event is an intensive, three to five day workshop in which employees involved in a process conduct brainstorming to educate each other about the impacts each has on completion of the process. The Kaizen event is generally a first step leading to improvement of the process.) The intent of this Kaizen was to address the office’s internal process for tracking corrective actions cases that resulted from inspections and findings from independent audits or self-assessment audits. The problem was that each of these audits caused different reporting requirements to be followed for tracking progress against completing the corrective actions. These differing requirements had created a separate process within the office, which had become non-standard and required large amounts of man-hours. The process was also poorly visible and contained duplication of effort.

Approach

The team developed current and future state value steam maps which provided a clear view of the corrective action process. The team could then see how individual roles interacted and could understand how information was exchanged. The team looked at all the techniques and tools being used to distribute information and the training that was being provided.

To address these issues, the team set about to develop new solutions to improve the exchange of information and provide better tools for tracking the process. First was the development of a centralized spreadsheet tool that all members could use to input status of the corrective action cases. This spreadsheet, housed on a computer network, provided access to all members and ensured central control of the tracking information. Second was a change in policy that standardized data input procedures to ensure that data was accurate and not duplicated across different roles. Third, the capability was developed to more efficiently create reports for management. A schedule was also developed to produce the reports which helped reduce the cycle time and duplication of effort.

Results

The EPA team was able to significantly reduce the amount of cycle time required for the audit corrective action tracking process and for the A-123 corrective action tracking process. For the audit tracking process, the team was successful in eliminating waste by reducing the cycle time by 68% (cutting 220 man-hours from the process). Other contributions to eliminating waste included reducing the number of handoffs by 86% (92 to 13) and reducing the total number of process steps by 62% (16 to 6).
For the A-123 process, the team was able to eliminate waste and reduce the cycle time by 46% (cutting 85 man-hours from the process). Further waste in the form of excessive handoffs was reduced by 74% (31 to 8) and in the form of total process steps, by 63% (8 to 3).

Combined, these reductions eliminated more than 300 hours of wasted work in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. This enabled employees to concentrate on other important work activities and to perform them with less stress.

EPA Lean Government, 2008