Organisational Performance Management
Tesco Stores
Tesco Stores were seeking new ways of sustaining their impressive growth in revenue and productivity. We helped them install a new approach to staffing check-out tills to reduce queues, a new night fill process, revised management roles, and the “Store Steering Wheel – a new set of performance metrics and practices. These improvements were rolled out across Tesco’s UK stores, contributing substantially to their continuing success.
Contact Centre Operations
Richard Branson had publicly committed the Virgin Group to improving rail travel in the UK over a five year period. Key to his commitment was a significant investment in Virgin TrainLine to provide passengers with improved access and greater value for money. Our development approach centred on the implementation of a new method for the management of individual and collective performance at Virgin TrainLine’s contact centres. Within twelve months, Virgin TrainLine became the largest retail rail outlet in the UK and within two years was taking twice the revenue of any other outlet.
Roadside Assistance
The AA’s service delivery and value for money had declined over a decade. Supported by ourselves and our IT partners, the AA established a new “annual hours” contract with staff and installed leading-edge scheduling software, to ensure availability and flexibility of deployment to match demand. We also helped them re-design their approach to performance planning, from front line to executive level. Within two years, the AA was rated by Which? magazine as their “Best Buy” for roadside assistance.
Building the case for service transformation
Landmark Consulting built the business case for multi-agency service transformation with Buckinghamshire County Council. This involved profiling service requests and providing a road map and benefits case for designing services around service user needs. The business case received Cabinet approval, and Buckinghamshire County Council is now two years into delivering the roadmap.
Healthcare
Operational and Strategic Management Capability Building
The Healthcare Commission’s Annual Report for 2007/08 mentions four significant improvements across the NHS. One of these was the delivery of significant improvements in ambulance service performance. Landmark Consulting has worked with six of the twelve ambulance services in mainland England and Wales. Landmark Consulting’s approach, based on our Connected Performance methodology is widely regarded as best practice in the management of ambulance services.
Managing Patient Flows in Real Time
With Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust, Landmark Consulting deployed our Control Tower methodology, based on Connected Performance and adapting Lean thinking principles, to manage demand and capacity in a number of outpatient clinics. This helped the Trust to deliver reduced waiting times alongside improved patient experience and clinical outcomes, not least by ensuring that clinically important follow-up appointments were balanced against pressures to achieve timely first definitive treatments.
World Class Commissioning Capability Development
In partnership with BUPA Health Dialog, Landmark Consulting has provided organisation development support for Programme Commissioning at NHS Norfolk. Programme Commissioning is seen by NHS Norfolk as the best way to integrate public health, strategic development, service redesign and provider performance management disciplines to improve and innovate the supply of health services for the population of Norfolk. The dimensions of this OD support included: strategy; portfolio management; structure, process, culture, skills, and information; and the development of external relationships.
World Class Commissioning Performance Management
Landmark Consulting led the redesign and implementation of a performance management system with Bath and North East Somerset PCT and Council. The design and implementation spanned the adoption of new management practices and the integration of financial and non-financial information to identify and tackle system management issues.
World Class Commissioning Use of Information
In partnership with Tribal Group, Landmark Consulting has supported the deployment of action-learning to embed pathway-based commissioning in the PCTs across South Central Strategic Health Authority. We were involved in a joint team with Tribal Group that developed a pathway-based commissioning guide tackling the provision and use of information required to enable pathway-based commissioning. Landmark Consulting’s contribution to this project was the development of a decision architecture mapping who comes together for what purpose from PBC locality to supra-PCT levels for high-priority long-term conditions, and how to present access, quality, outcome, activity and finance information to support effective decision-making.
Development of Decision-Making Practices in an Acute Provider
Building on the work of Monitor, Landmark Consulting worked with Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare NHS Trust to develop their decision-making practices in support of becoming a Foundation Trust. The Trust adopted a number of new practices as a result of this work, including establishing service lines, single-point accountability for service line performance and improvement, and effective service line reviews. Their Board now has a much clearer and distinctive remit to supervise executive management and develop strategy.
Information Strategy to Support National Clinical Policy
Landmark Consulting provided the method and coached a multi-disciplinary team of clinicians and informatics specialists to deliver an information strategy in support of the National Service Framework for Renal Services: Working for Children and Young People with the NHS Health & Social Care Information Centre and the Department of Health.
Utilities
Field Effectiveness and Quality
Cost pressures in BT had led to a management culture of stressing speed over quality in field engineering work, causing increases in the number of faults experienced by customers. We established the approach of viewing productivity and quality together, replacing “jobs per man per day” with standards-based “quality task times”. Results showed a 75% reduction in fault rates as a result of eliminating both direct and indirect repeat faults.
£5m pa Savings from End-to-End Core Process Reviews
To support significant cost reduction goals, an energy industry client asked us to help with end-to-end reviews for six of their top-priority customer service processes, using our concepts and tools of Lean Transformation. Each of these processes spanned multiple sites and directorates, and therefore required the deployment of a project team including process owners, managers and operators from diverse parts of the business. Following a series of project team workshops to provide appropriate training, we facilitated a process that prioritised improvements.
The overall result of the six process reviews was a cost reduction of c. £5m per annum, with either zero or positive impact on customer experience in each case.
Service Transformation to Enable Customers to Take their Own Meter Readings
A lean service transformation project with a major energy utility produced short-term benefits of c. £630,000 over two years, while also improving customer experience. Longer-term strategic improvements involved some technological development alongside better targeting of customers to request meter readings at certain points in the billing cycle, and were estimated to be capable of bringing cost savings in excess of £4.5m over two years as well as substantial benefits to customers.
The project involved implementing an industry concept that was becoming popular: namely offering customers the opportunity of taking their own meter readings. This gives customers the benefit of more accurate billing, while also reducing operational costs for our client. Our approach made use of Lean transformation principles to implement the idea, hence making both the design process and execution more efficient and reducing potential errors. Using our proprietary Value Rating Matrix, we were also able to optimise and rationalise service channels. This approach was so successful that we were then asked to train a cadre of managers and professionals in how to use these techniques.