North Herts Have adopted the MyLASER^TM ‘lean approach’ programme as their transformation methodology. The service areas reviewed to date are Environmental Services (new Waste & Recycling service with AWC), Housing (CHRA), Planning (Planning Applications, Appeals, Enforcement, LDF Monitoring & Consultation), Building Control (Building Control Applications and Site Inspections), Bus Passes, IT, Grants and HR Recruitment.

As part of the knowledge transfer requirement, staff have been trained and mentored in conducting service transformation reviews with the Sequena lean six sigma based approach and are now carrying this out across the Council in service area priority order. Seven (7) key processes in the IT service area have recently been reviewed by the NHDC in-house team with expert service mentoring support from Sequena.

Environmental Services were the first area (reviewed with a corresponding transformation roadmap created) to confirm actual cashable savings of £105,000 returned to the corporate budget concerning the move to Alternate Weekly Collections (AWC). Planning & Building Control are implementing transformation roadmaps at this time to release cashable savings of £198,000. This includes £48,000 cashable savings from the implementation of document management software (EDRMS) for Building Control applications alone – this software was Anite@Work which had already been previously implemented in the Revenues & Benefits service area of the Council.

A total of £397,462 cash-releasing savings are being taken from the reviews carried out over the last 12 months and are being removed from the budget. The customised approach is being continually updated to fit the situation of the Council and each service area being reviewed.