Background
Having expanded the number and range of service it provided to both business customers and individuals over a number of decades, our public sector client found itself in the position where the services had become costly and no longer viable to maintain in their current form.
What we did
We were engaged to conduct a review of the services with the objective of identifying potential cost savings by evaluating the efficiency and relevance of each individual service.
We understood that the challenge for our client was going to be maintaining appropriate service levels whilst meeting customer needs and ensuring it was able to meet its social obligations.
Our first step was to identify the core services that our client was providing and what customer needs they were satisfying. We then led the analysis to look at each service provision on an end-to-end basis, to understand how widely and how often the services were being used, what the operating and management costs were, and what the funding source was.
As part of our review we identified that some of the services being provided had limited value but were costing a disproportionate amount of their operating budget. Others had not been reviewed for many years, and the service levels were being hamstrung by inefficient processes linked to legacy supporting software. This had given rise to a number of workarounds and inconsistency, further increasing the costs.
By using critical and design thinking, we reassessed the value of each service by taking a customer centric view and redesigned the process by removing redundant activity.
The Result
The result was a set of services that were more efficient and cost effective, were need and outcome focussed, and provided clear value to our client and its customers in both financial and social terms.