A large U.S. regulatory agency conducts global oversight activities of products on the U.S. market. The agency’s critical mission impacts the health and safety of every person in the country.
As demand for their work has skyrocketed amidst growing markets and an ever-expanding number of facilities to inspect, the agency came under intense pressure. It needed to expand its oversight activities within the confines of its existing budget and staffing levels—without compromising public safety.
Goal
Optimize global inspection operations through process improvement so the agency can increase the quality and quantity of inspections. All against the backdrop of increasing demand and constrained resources.
Unconventional consulting—and breakthrough results
The optimized, future-state process redesign identified potential for the agency to realize:
annual recoupable
capacity
increase in
automated activities
reduction in unassisted
manual activities
Our starting point
Eagle Hill’s expertise in business processes improvement and implementing regulatory oversight best practices, paired with our established trust with the agency, enabled us to swiftly pinpoint and address the core of their inspection process challenges.
We gathered and scrutinized 119 artifacts, including those related to government accountability, internal and external reports, congressional legislation, internal processing reports, and inspection data.
We supplemented our quantitative analysis with interviews and work groups, engaging more than 200 agency stakeholders. Combined, this information became the basis for evaluating and identifying business process improvement opportunities.
We developed a quick-win report for the client to implement recommendations that would yield positive impacts within the first 90 days.
We focused our initial attention on the three subprocesses with the most touchpoints, mapping global processes against each other to see how well they aligned. We then used the criteria as the model for identifying enterprise-wide process improvements across seven core agency programs.
The roadmap to success
Eagle Hill examined 850 operational activities, found 6 key systemic issues, and provided 19 recommendations for reducing variability and optimizing operations across global processes. For example, to address high turnover and a high vacancy rate, we focused on reducing burnout by balancing workload distribution and identifying low value-add activities to prioritize for automation.
Our IT analysis uncovered that the agency was entangled in the complexity of using dozens of disparate IT systems, leading to overlap and inefficiency. Through mapping and analysis, we pinpointed opportunities for automation, consolidation, and other IT enhancements.
Eagle Hill actively engaged with staff across the organization to gain their buy-in on project objectives. Recognizing the challenges likely to arise during implementation, we took the time to learn the lay of their land: the unique issues, vernacular, and sensitivities of the work. This upfront effort allowed us to provide relevant and actionable recommendations aligned to the agency’s unique culture, supported by their staff, and aimed to improve mission-critical delivery.
We based our recommendations on valid comparisons, not just with best practices at other agencies, but also among internal pockets of excellence. By demonstrating objectivity and an understanding of the ways things worked, we instilled confidence in how our recommendations would target the issues staff had raised.
Our comparison of the current and future state of operations identified an opportunity for the agency to decrease the overall number of its activities (eliminating duplicative or low-value ones) by 23%, increase system assisted activities by 29%, reduce unassisted manual activities by 65%, and increase automated activities by 3.8 times.
As a result, the agency launched targeted initiatives informed by Eagle Hill’s insights to boost its inspection process efficiency. This strategic shift has directly benefited over 330 million Americans, showcasing an improvement in public health and safety oversight without expanding resources.
Related Services
Business process improvementPerformance improvementRelated Industries
Federal governmentState and local government
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