Innovative Success Stories: Using Lean to Improve Finance Operations

About the Program

Category: Financial Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

King County, Washington is implementing Lean management to deliver government services more efficiently. Its goal is to become the Best Run Government in the United States. In 2013, King County’s central finance agency, the Finance and Business Operations Division (FBOD), launched its Lean journey to streamline operations, ensure we provide value to our customers, and create a work culture focused on problem solving and respect. The three success stories in this application reflect a diverse sampling of the bold and inventive ideas that have come from FBOD’s Lean journey. All of these efforts are new and innovative ways to provide the best possible service to our customers. These examples all reflect new ways of thinking about how to improve the administration of existing county government programs. And they all are upgrading the working conditions for county employees and providing measurable results through enhanced employee productivity and improved constituent service. The examples highlighted in this application include: 1) the Finance Process Information Center (FPIC) initiative to document standard work across the agency and continually improve it; 2) the P-Card Program to more efficiently purchase goods and services (resulting in process savings of $7.1 million and new revenues of $884,000 per year); and 3) a Treasury initiative to measure real-time property tax customer satisfaction using innovative desktop kiosks.