Halte Werk is a Dutch company that awards social benefits to the unemployed. Thanks to lean thinking, they were able to radically transform the service they offer them.

They manage the awarding of social benefits to the unemployed and offers support to find work on behalf of three municipalities in the Netherlands. Their goal is to help people to get back on their feet and bring order back to their lives: to do this, the organization strives to remove the barriers preventing people from finding work, while issuing social benefits to them in the interim.

We started with a week-long value stream mapping exercise to find opportunities for improvement in the process and, for each of them, we supported the team in starting an A3.

Three of the four kaizens the team decided to pursue proved successful (one turned out to be based on a wrong assumption that people who had some income but were eligible for additional benefits were able to correctly state their income as soon as they received the funds).

Overall, the new way of working piloted in the project successfully activated 50% of the people involved to take concrete steps to improve their chances of finding work or participating in society in other ways (like voluntary work). A huge success as the target of 12,5% was initially deemed as “too ambitious” by many for this specific client group.

Read about the summary of the kaizens and how they engaged the leadership: https://planet-lean.com/lean-services-social-benefits/