On Tuesday, Springfield City Council heard a consultant’s update on so-called lean management practices, in a bid to improve the efficiency of city departments.
Consultant Randy Will led an hour-long discussion about lean management for City Council, as they oversee some 2,000 city employees and a $500 million budget.
"Lean is a mindset," Will told Council. "It really is about, all about focusing on meeting or exceeding our customers’ needs, both internal and externally.”
Will said customer satisfaction and respect for people are two core principles of lean management. He noted that a couple of Springfield city departments have already been working with lean techniques. For building development services, it’s been a two-year process, with numerous changes that council members called “commendable” and “meaningful” during their meeting.
For example, building inspectors now have QR codes added to code enforcement cases that they use in the field. This allows the inspectors to get much faster status updates and better serve business developers or other partners of the city. In the department of environmental services, the number of budget buckets for city spending has been reduced from 100 to 22, streamlining operations, Will said.
City Manager Jason Gage told Council that adopting lean management would need to be a step-by-step process across city departments, instead of an all-at-once approach.
