Written by Kara Cuzzetto is a Lean Specialist at King County and previously worked in Healthcare where she became Lean certified.
The Wastewater Division process for Procurement Contracts took over 300 days to complete and team members didn’t fully understand the entire process.
The team performed a Gemba Walk, created a Process Map which allowed them to understand the whole process from start-to-finish. and then started analyzing the evaluation phase of their process to identify what needs to happen after a procurement contract passes an evaluation.
The first improvement the team made was to create a new standard template, which simplified a form that originally had 36 pages with 22 criteria down to 11 pages and 6 criteria. This effectively eliminated rework and extra-processing.
The entire project took over a year to complete and they were able to take the process lead time from 171+ days to 151 days. Because they streamlined the process, the team also increased their capacity to do more contracts every year. Now they can do 18 instead of just 12.
Watch the 30 minute video or read the transcript at https://goleansixsigma.com/project-presentation-webinar-streamlining-architectural-engineering-professional-aep-procurement-process-kara-cuzzetto/