Business Process Improvement

Business Process Improvement is about improving service delivery during the CSR07 period and beyond. There are four main improvement themes:  

• Satisfying customers at the first point of contact in their access channel of choice

• Measuring the costs of service transactions as part of the management and improvement process through Rough-cut Activity Based Costing

• Enhancing front-line services by improving business processes in ways that make a difference to citizens

• Unlocking potential efficiency benefits from a shared service delivery that also reduces the need for citizens to join up islands of local service

Business Process Improvement can help:

• Reducing waste in service delivery

• Increasing the proportion of customers using more efficient service delivery channels

• Understanding customers’ lifestyle preferences for service delivery

• Help services meet customers' needs

• Promoting a better corporate understanding of what it actually costs to deliver a service

• Understanding the dynamics of service demand and how it can be managed more efficiently to avoid the need for further contact

• Integrating web services with back office systems (e.g. CRM in order to offer customers a genuine choice in the way they receive services)

• More collaborative working to improve coordination in local service delivery and economies of scale through shared services

"...The drive to improve the health and wellbeing of all working-age people coincides with a Government vision of transformed public service provision.  This means accessible and responsive services that improve continuously to meet increasingly complex social, environmental and economic challenges.  In meeting these, local authorities and their delivery partners need constantly to optimise VFM and the performance of available resources – especially the all important human ones... 

...Business Process Improvement is one of the techniques that organisations are using to improve efficiency and effectiveness, and it has become a particularly common approach to institute change due to the methodology’s focus on involving staff in the redesign of their jobs and the activities they perform...

...What has become apparent from NPIP Pathfinder authorities and other BPI projects in local public services is that the very interventions aimed primarily at improving effectiveness can, when managed well, have positive benefits for the morale and wellbeing of staff.  BPI techniques help because they systematically address the costs and causes of inefficiency and stress, not the symptoms of low productivity and poor service..."

Extract from: Creating Better Jobs: Lessons from Business Process Improvement - HSE and CLG