Recording Process Improvement

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

How often can we make a radical change? I’m talking the kind of change that blows your mind. The kind of change that spins the world off into a new direction. Think Tim Berners Lee building the first Web browser; Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin; Henry Ford creating the assembly line. When Ford introduced the assembly line he reduced the time it took to build a car from 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes. That’s a 380 percent speed boost! We couldn’t believe this kind of change was possible from a small, local government, but it was. We began creating our own radical change with a process improvement activity called a "kaizen." We looked at our recording process which consisted of over 100 steps and was taking us 20 days, on average, to record, index, and make available to the public a single document. After implementation of many collaborative solutions generated by our kaizen, we reduced the time it took to process a recorded document from 20 days down to one day (in many cases minutes). That’s a 1,900 percent speed boost! We didn’t start out wanting to show up Mr. Ford’s productivity, but that’s what we did.