Our weekly media briefing today will be focussing on the implementation of the Department’s Turnaround Strategy.
Background
In 2007 the department undertook a process of improving service delivery in terms of its key focus areas in general and identity documents (IDs) in particular. The process was a collaborative one, undertaken in conjunction, with the Department of Public Service and Administration.
Drawing on management approaches commonly used in production industries, we introduced an operations management approach which was supported with the appropriate tools, including inter alia, a governance model and on-the-job training to ensure the approach became integrated with the culture of the organisation
Challenges that needed to be addressed:
In June 2007, it took an average of 127 days to get an ID, with some customers waiting as long as 250 days. This resulted in the following:
- Many customers were applying multiple times at different offices
- Temporary IDs had to be renewed many times
- 40% of customers at front offices were enquiring about the progress with their IDs
- Long queues, frustrated customers, complaints and bad publicit.
There was no mechanism to track and monitor status or progress with applications and the backlogs of applications throughout the Central Production Facility was standing at more than 236 000.
Elements of the Turnaround Strategy
- A major focus of the Turnaround Programme was on ID related processes and customer interactions; both at the front of the value chain (more than 242 Home Affairs offices around the country) as well as the back end (central Identity Document processing facility)
- The prioritising of IDs was based on the importance of IDs for citizens and the need to make a serious impact to give the public and staff confidence in the department and the change programme. It would also be a model for other key business processes
- ID book production process was analysed and a new end-to-end process was designed, reducing the production steps from 80 to 15.
Examples of improvements and tools introduced are:
- A track and trace system: required staff to scan IDs in and out of each stage of the process, allowing the turnaround team to understand how much time an ID spent in a given section and to locate slow areas
- New finger-print scanning machines: resulting in the turnaround time in the Fingerprint Verification Section being reduced from 27 days to 4 days and clearing of 236 000 backlogged records
- A single courier service was put in place, with a strong SLA, to pick up ID applications and drop off completed ID books at front offices
- The introduction of the Online Verification of Fingerprints enabled the immediate issuance of Temporary Identity Certificates
- Officials were organised into small cells/teams instead of long assembly lines in the Completion Section
- Workstations were demarcated and colour coded with clearly defined areas for incoming and outgoing work
- A front office checklist was developed to ensure that application information is correct and complete; and implementation teams trained
- Individual and group performance targets were negotiated with staff -targets were realistic and achievable
- Visible and daily monitoring based on actual performance data was introduced
- Weekly quality reports are produced and distributed to all offices and monitored, including exceptions reporting and monitoring
- Regular operations review meetings are held at all levels to monitor output and quality
- We are pleased to present a summary of the key service delivery achievements as a result of the turnaround strategy:
- Reduced turnaround times for IDs from an average of 127 days to less than 45 days
- By end of 2008, 93% of customers polled said waiting times for IDs were faster than expected and 92% said they were impressed with the new SMS notification
- An efficient Customer Contact Centre answering 95% of calls in 20 seconds and resolving 90% of calls on first contact
- End-to–end Track and Trace system functionality allowing for the tracking of applications throughout the production process as well as sending of SMS alerts to customers
- Extension of Track and Trace to cover other documents including passports, birth, marriage, death, citizenship and later registration of birth
- The department now has an in-house capacity to roll-out this approach to other areas of service delivery such as permits
