Profile

A large European city which experienced a huge population growth over a short period of time. Attractions of the area include the low cost of doing business, a reasonable tax structure, a skilled and well educated work force, low crime rate, superior schools, affordable housing and and excellent quality of life.

Challenge

To stay competitive with other cities in the proximity, the city needed to attract more commercial development. The city acknowleged that it needed to improve it's planning permission process. At the time it took three months on average for a developer to receive a permission after submitting an application. Not only that, an overly-complicated formula contributed to a 73% first-time error rate for calculating fees.

Solution

Budget constraints meant that it wasn't possible to simply hire more personnel to deal with the increasing volume and growing backlog of applications. The City decided to implement a Lean Six Sigma approach to the planning application process.

• Over the assessment period the process flow of the planning application process was documented. 
• The current state data was analysed.
• Opportunities for improvement were identified.
• A new material flow process was developed.
• A pilot test was trialed to see how the new process performed.

Results

From the pilot the following results were obtained:

• Unnecessary and redundant work was eliminated.
• The number of steps within the planning application process was reduced from 59 down to 21.
• This reduced an overall process time from 3 months to 22 days.
• The fee calculation error rate was reduced from 73% to below 12%.