Summary

A London Council used Statius to assist their staff streamline the processes and practices of the Street Lighting department.

The problem

The council wanted to both improve and document the current operations undertaken by the Street Lighting department.

The client

The Council is one of London’s leading borough councils employing 5000 staff in over 40 departments, one of which is Street Lighting.

The Street Lighting section controls and monitors all activities related to the provision and maintenance of street lighting equipment over the 500 miles of road in the local area; the actual works being carried out by a contractor on behalf of the Borough. The Council’s responsibilities included monitoring the contractor, performance checking, dealing with fault reports, site supervision, enquiries and complaints, budgetary control and dealing with regional electricity boards.

The approach and the solution

The first stage of the project consisted of working with the team to understand the existing processes and then to establish exactly how they were being managed. The ISO 9001 standard was then used as a framework to make recommendations on how to re-engineer and improve processes and practices and, once agreed, the new processes were flow charted to capture all relevant information. Lastly, the detail of each flowcharted step was documented in order to capture and hold the gains made.

The outcome

The trial was so successful that the Council then commissioned Statius to undertake the same process for the Major Works section which controls and monitors all planned maintenance work to carriageways and footways. This section’s responsibilities included winter maintenance (for footways), preparing carriage and footway schemes, traffic management, advising residents of proposed footway schemes, dealing with residents’ requests for vehicle crossings and, finally, complaints and enquiries.

Statius then went on to undertake similar projects for a number of other sections, for instance: Minor Works, Highways Enforcement, Highways Inspection.

• “Statius provided reports for each section making recommendations beyond the scope of the original project”

• “Numerous efficiency and effectiveness improvements were identified and implemented”

• “We were exceptionally pleased with the structure and focus that the exercise gave each team and how Statius concentrated on our minds on improving the effectiveness of existing processes”.