Vale of Glamorgan Council

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Vale of Glamorgan Council

In 2000, Chris Highley was appointed to oversee the financial management of the department. He could see that ConSol could be utilised much more effectively. "It was a good system; it had lots of functionality that we were not using. I could see that the problems that had become associated with the system were mostly caused by the fact that we had not set it up properly." With Fujitsu's help he set about customising and implementing ConSol to meet the DLO's needs.

The Challenge

The Vale of Glamorgan Council has 8,000 properties, including 7,000 houses. The responsibility for maintaining these lies with the council’s Direct Labour Organisation (DLO) which uses 100 operatives to carry out 40,000 jobs each year at an annual turnover of £5m.

Because the Vale of Glamorgan is the result of a merger between two smaller authorities, the DLO did not have one comprehensive system for managing its workload. It had different bits of legacy systems and was heavily reliant on paper processes. For a small department, it had a huge throughput of jobs and really needed to control the workforce more effectively. It also wanted to move more towards planning rather than just coping with the workload.

The nature of local government means that the DLO is under constant pressure to obtain and provide best value. In-house clients have the option of going elsewhere so it needs to make sure it is competitive. Yet, as a public sector organisation, it has a large fixed base cost. The DLO receives excellent feedback from tenants and knows from its own research that it is competitive on price but it really wanted to improve the way it operated, managed and reported its business.

In particular, the department had a late billing problem. It also had a problem with analysis. It wanted, for example, to see more clearly how it was performing against target timescales. Job tickets were not returned to the department until a job was finished. Meanwhile operatives were submitting timesheets. It was not possible to see exactly what the workforce was doing at any one time.

The Solution

The council decided that it needed a job costing and reporting tool. After reviewing various applications, it bought ConSol in 1998. This was set up initially as a job entry system; however implementation got no further because the employee responsible left shortly after installing the system.

In 2000, Chris Highley was appointed to oversee the financial management of the department. He could see that ConSol could be utilised much more effectively. "It was a good system; it had lots of functionality that we were not using. I could see that the problems that had become associated with the system were mostly caused by the fact that we had not set it up properly." With Fujitsu’s help he set about customising and implementing ConSol to meet the DLO’s needs.

Chris was particularly looking for the ability to analyse. To do this he knew that uniform methods of entering data had to be agreed. He also wanted job costing information. "Because we did not originally understand how the system worked we were using our financial accounting system which was not very satisfactory. We had to get proper information onto our own system."

"It was a good system; it had lots of functionality that we were not using. I could see that the problems that had become associated with the system were mostly caused by the fact that we had not set it up properly."

The Benefits

Chris Highley estimates that the department is now 20% more productive. "We know far more about the way we work than we did. We can go into the system and get anything out of it. We can see how long different job types take and we can review jobs outstanding; profitability by job type and group; and the performance of different groups."

Because timesheets can be input on a job by job basis, the DLO now has detailed time based information. "This is a small aspect but very important, we now know what everyone’s doing" commented Chris Highley. "We can clearly see which jobs are due to be completed in the next few days so we can apply extra focus and effort if required. This means we are working much better within target dates. We can see improvements in performance. The ratio of jobs finished on time has gone up from an average of 75% to an average of 85%. We want to keep on improving in this area."

According to Chris Highley, the department has always been competitive on price but did not have detailed control of individual job costs. "We are now at that stage; we can see the effectiveness of each operative and supervisor. My aim is that each manager gets weekly print outs: details of profitability on a job by job basis plus high level productivity reports. If our sinks are taking longer to fit, for example, we need to know if it is our working practices or if we are simply getting the time wrong. I’d like to see every supervisor with a set of report screens and we’ll have that sorted within the next few months.Once you have that information you have everything you need to exercise control at a basic level and measure performance against the schedule of terms and rates."

Previous methods of working involved a tremendous amount of duplication. Information was written down by hand, entered into the system by an administrator, printed off and passed around as a hard copy. If there were any variations on a job, extra information had to be written down and input. The council is now eliminating the double and treble handling of data. "The result is that we get jobs done more quickly; invoices are raised faster and we only have physical intervention at two stages – at prior inspection and on completion. As a result, we will not need to use agency or temporary staff in the future. We expect to have fewer queries and to reduce mistakes on final bills because we are avoiding the margin of error and the time lag that occurs every time a piece of data had to be regenerated."

The Expertise

Fujitsu has worked with Vale of Glamorgan Council to customise ConSol so that it gives the DLO the ability to really manage its information. "Once we get information into the system, we can get anything out" said Chris Highley. "Fujitsu is very, very fast at responding to our requests. I have been really impressed. I would recommend their experts. There has been no question they have not yet been able to answer, they have always been able to do something I have asked for, and very promptly."

Chris Highley has a clear vision of what comes next. "I’d like to see every stage of the process done by hand held devices. I believe that we can save up to 50% of the time it takes us currently to organise ourselves and our work. With all time, cost and stores data held centrally we can cut out lots of processes and paperwork. Operatives, for example, will no longer need to use timesheets. They can log the start and end of a work period onto a mobile. Working this effectively would really contain overheads." The council has already allocated a budget for this development and Fujitsu is working with DLO to set up a pilot in 2003.

"I’d like to see every stage of the process done by hand held devices. I believe that we can save up to 50% of the time it takes us currently to organise ourselves and our work."