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£155,000 bottom line saving in 5 weeks through step change performance of scanning bureau

Background

A major UK defence organisation had set up a comprehensive document management system for the storage and archiving of key data. This was to enable rapid retrieval of all relevant information by 1300 staff and to ensure that a secure copy was retained centrally.

However, the scanning bureau became a bottleneck at the point of scanning and indexing documents. The delay between loading the documents onto the system and being able to retrieve them dynamically became an issue to the point that staff began keeping their own duplicate sets of documents, causing confusion and further delay.

This was calculated as costing the business 8 man years of lost time in retrieving the documents and also incurred additional costs of £155,000 pa in contracting excess scanning to an outside company in order to keep approximate pace with incoming documents

The Challenge

To eliminate the need for high cost external scanning services through a step change in operational efficiency

Project Structure

Newton worked with the local scanning team to identify and tackle the constraints in the process. A new process was determined and implemented removing superfluous steps and improving the efficiency of the remaining process. Key areas for improvment were the implementation of a tracking system to identify where items were in the process and a simplification of the checking processes.

The Project

One Newton consultant facilitated the local team for 2 weeks to identify the required changes. The consultant worked with the team during the 3 week implementation phase ensuring that the output quality was improved and the efficiency gains were realised.

The Result

The improved process has led to a reduction in backlog time from 3 months to 1 week with the same resource and bringing back in house all the previously outsourced scanning, saving £155,000 per annum. Additionally the time spent by staff retrieving dynamic data has been considerably reduced, providing more complete information for project management and decision making.

GRAPH SHOWING TIME EFFICIENCY IMPROVEMENT

For more information on our work in Defence please contact kevinjones@newtonconsulting.co.uk

A 10% - 50% increase in the performance of any manufacturing process in 2 - 6 months without capital expenditure