King County Reduces Procurement Process Lead Time By 12% With GLSS
King County successfully creates internal partnerships to streamline procurement processes between agencies. Continuous Improvement Manager Kara Cuzzetto talks about a successful project and how Wastewater Treatment Division and the Financial Business Operations Division helped to reduce lead time in Procurement efforts.
THE CHALLENGE
Procurement contracts take upwards of 300 days to complete, and county team members donât have a full understanding of the entire Procurement process.
THE DISCOVERY
The team started their improvement project by identifying where their process begins and ends. The team then performed a Process Walk and created a Process Map which allowed them to understand the whole process from start-to-finish. After mapping the process, Karaâs team broke it down into distinct phases, and the âahaâ moments began!
They started analyzing the evaluation phase of their process to identify the necessary information for contracts and what needs to happen after a procurement contract passes an evaluation.
The team used a SIPOC to identify their customer and stakeholder requirements which helped them determine what they absolutely must deliver from both the customer and stakeholder perspective. Many processes in government are designed around stakeholder requirements and often the customer requirements are not considered in the process design.
The King County team conducted listening tours and were able to identify the pain points of everyone involved in the process, and they found agreement around the same pain points for everyone.
One of the common pain points? Incomplete documents submitted too early was creating an inordinate amount of rework. Wastewater employees thought that by submitting their documents earlier, theyâd be reserving a seat âin-line,â but this isnât how the process worked at all. It just meant that more touches happened along the way, and more opportunity for error. Also, the Procurement Division team realized there was no transparency into the Procurement process for Wastewater, and this needed to change.
THE IMPROVEMENTS
The first improvement the team made was to create a new standard template for assessing the scope of their work on a contract. The original document for doing this was 36 pages with 22 criteria. They simplified the form to only 11 pages and 6 criteria, effectively eliminating rework and extra-processing. This alone was a huge win!
They also created new documents for contract negotiation with guidelines around roles and responsibilities, timelines, and communication. This has allowed the team to determine whether a contract is on track and on time – full transparency!
All said and done, the process lead time went 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.
The entire improvement project took the team at King County over a year to complete, but the results speak for themselves!
When asked what her favorite part of the project, Kara said,
âI think for me it was at the beginning of the project – some of those âahaâ moments from the team discovering that they had the same pain points, and the fact that right off the bat we were able to eliminate a format that had four signatures on it just by having a conversation.â
Procurement is typically a process that is painful for many parties involved, but this Procurement team is now better aligned and continually improving the process to speed procurement up with improvements that promote communication and transparency. We canât wait to hear how many contracts theyâre processing now!
Kara Cuzzetto is a Lean Specialist at King County and previously worked in Healthcare where she became Lean certified. When the Wastewater Division of King County reached out to ask if the county wanted to help them in streamlining their Procurement Process, Kara and her team eagerly agreed!