Client: Wirral Partnership Homes

Sector: Housing

Key tools or services

Value Stream Mapping, Lean Implementation

Having been inspired by the success of Lean Thinking within the Manufacturing sector, we recognised that the principles and processes were equally transferable to our business environment

Brian Simpson, Chief Executive - Wirral Partnership Homes

Requirement

We were commissioned by Wirral Partnership Homes to re-engineer the Value Stream for their Void and Investment Void processes.

With approximately 13,000 homes registered, Wirral Partnership Homes was also challenged with raising all their homes to the Government's decent homes standard by 2010, carrying out a £150M programme of improvements across their housing stock.

By eliminating waste within their Void and Investment Void processes, Wirral Partnership Homes was looking to exploit these opportunities in order to optimise their cash flow and competitiveness, in addition to creating a more customer-centric product and service provision.

Response

Lean is a philosophy of creating more value with less work. In doing so, Lean focuses on eliminating successive layers of waste within a process. If waste exists, then the concepts of Lean Thinking can be applied. These principles are equally transferable from manufacturing to back office environments.

At Wirral Partnership Homes the average lead time for a Void was 67 days, which also represented the critical path of the process. The Voids process comprised 72 process steps, of which 6 were deemed to be value adding, 47 essential non-value adding and 19 waste steps. The process also contained 26 days of inherent idle time.

Result

As a result of the Value Stream Mapping activity, the critical path of the future state process was re-engineered to 15 working days, which represented a longer term improvement of 78%. However, in the short term, time savings of 22.5 days were identified with actions in place to deliver a 33% improvement in cycle time.

picme® brought with them a good balance of manufacturing and service sector knowledge and experience, and quickly understood the business processes which underpin our services. We recognised that our performance on re-letting properties was poor. Working collaboratively with our employees, picme® facilitated a number of lean solutions which presented immediate and tangible benefits, and left our staff with the skills to continue the improvement journey

The Project Team identified and delivered solutions to reduce the re-let time for Voids from 65 to 15 days, with an immediate 33% improvement. This will impact not only to improve on our published performance, but will mean we are more cost effective and offer a better quality of service to our customers

Brian Simpson, Chief Executive - Wirral Partnership Homes

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