i-nexus blog

The Private sector has been cutting costs for some time and inevitably the Public sector was going to follow suit.  Invariably when the government looks to cut costs, there’s a knee jerk reaction, such as county councils considering cutting school bus runs or redundancies triggered by accountants .  This is where senior councillors target the obvious overheads without properly understanding the waste within their departments, the scale of it or where it exists.  High levels of waste can be found in the Private sector, particularly in transactional office based environments (>70% is not un-common).  I suspect that waste in the Public sector is even higher and the savings even easier to access.  Common sense alone would deliver huge savings (as long as proper analysis is carried out).  Lean Six Sigma techniques would deliver the remaining savings and further ensure that they’re sustainable.  The public sector should learn from the private sector and their journey of steadily improving efficiency.  To do this, they need to be open to the possibility that a little time spent up-front, analysing and understanding waste and variation goes a long way to greater and more sustainable savings.