More states look to Japanese to improve system

December 28, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Maine’s death certificates are being issued so quickly these days that an out-of-stater recently confessed to a state government official that he wants to die there.

In Ohio, the time it takes to get a complaint decided at the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation has plummeted — from an average of 142 days to 34. Licensing a snowmobile in Iowa involves 90 percent fewer steps today than it did two years ago.

Buoyed by the uncanny effectiveness of the Japanese notion of kaizen, or continuous improvement, a growing number of cash-strapped states are attacking bulky bureaucracies that have been eating up workers’ time and frustrating residents and businesses for decades.

“It has taken off like wildfire around the country,” said Teresa Hay McMahon, performance results director in Iowa, where kaizen was first used in state government about five years ago.

“If it was a management tool in the ’80s or the ’90s, my God, we tried it — Total Quality Management, Management by Total Improvement, Management by Walking Around,” McMahon said. “We just struggled with finding a really powerful tool that worked.”

Kaizen (pronounced ky-ZEHN) is a way of thinking that puts workers at the center, gives them a sense of the total process they’re involved in, and then frees them to think of ways to best do their jobs. Essentially, the idea is to diagram the work step by step to try to find better ways to do it. To get at the root of problems, kaizen encourages asking “why” five times.

“We’re making the work visible by doing the mapping,” said Walter Lowell, director of lean management at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. “Everybody knows they play a role in it, but they don’t know the whole thing.

“You start to hear things like ‘Why are you doing that? I do it.’”

In five-day kaizen exercises, managers, workers, lawyers, regulators, technicians and end users of a single government process — say, getting a coal mine permit — are assembled in one room, all getting educated about the big picture, and all there to talk about their little piece. The task that’s being targeted is meticulously mapped, using colored sticky notes to identify junctures where paperwork must be filed, decisions made, sign-offs obtained.

Stretching sometimes across a conference room wall, the results emerge as an impressive, complex matrix. Participants gaze, admire — and then set to work trying to eliminate most of what’s there.

Latasha Phillips, an account clerk with the Ohio Department of Administrative Services, was scared heading into her first kaizen exercise in October. She wound up a true believer.

“For me, it was exciting,” said the 12-year state employee. “A lot of times you think that you may not be a part of something, but this teaches you are a part of it — and you get to put your piece into it, to fit your piece into the puzzle.”

State environmental regulators around the nation, whose cumbersome processes have long been the targets of business developers, have taken particular interest in using kaizen. According to data from the Environmental Council of the States, only two state environmental agencies — Iowa’s and Minnesota’s — had tried the technique before 2005.

By 2006, nine states’ environmental agencies were on board and, by this year, 29 had either conducted a kaizen session or were planning one.

Steve Wall, quality services director at the Ohio Department of Administrative Services, said dedicating an uninterrupted week to streamlining the process is the key to the technique’s success.

“What that does is, if you’re into change theory, it unfreezes the situation,” Wall said. “You cannot filibuster, you cannot stall. You look at this thing and say, ‘OK, justify that.’ And even if that’s my job, I can’t.”

Mental light bulbs pop on. Epiphanies are experienced.

In Maine, it occurred to someone during a kaizen session that death certificates could be issued months faster if copies, instead of the originals, were sent to be copied to microfiche. That way, vital records employees, who can’t release a death certificate without the original in hand, could speed up the process.

It was an achingly simple solution to what had become a bureaucratic nightmare.

Processing of death certificates — required to access bank accounts and distribute an estate — went from taking 95 days on average to five in the state. Space that had been needed to store copies was saved, and costs for transporting all the paper were slashed.

“We got calls from people saying they want to die in Maine now because they can get the death records so quickly,” said Maine’s Lowell.

Critics of kaizen say that the downfalls of a process can never be understood so quickly and without well-mapped data that shows where a system is failing. And many argue that kaizen treats the symptom and not the cause of bureaucratic build-up, because it doesn’t get at the outside demands a state agency faces because of its own failures to provide proper information or services.

It is made clear at the outset of each kaizen exercise that no one will lose their job as a result of the efficiencies that result. Some state agencies have shrunk their staffs through attrition in the wake of kaizen improvements, however.

Mostly jobs change, such as those of Iowa’s environmental engineers after the landfill permitting process was broken down. It now takes 30 days on average to renew a permit instead of 187 days, for example, allowing engineers more time to inspect sites for regulatory violations, McMahon said.

Cost savings come in two basic forms: eliminating processes that cost money to operate, and speeding up processes that have money attached to them.

Ohio has saved both ways, Wall said. Through kaizen, a cumbersome complaint system for injured workers was made to work better, eliminating about half the hearings that used to be required at a savings of $220,000 a year. Speeding up the identification of Medicaid overpayments, the state expects to collect $44 million this fiscal year instead of the projected $11 million.

Kaizen has its roots in the flow production of the auto assembly line pioneered by Henry Ford in 1913. Executives at Toyota adapted Ford’s model beginning in the 1940s to add the employee-centered notion of continuous improvement, according to a history of the movement written by the Lean Enterprise Institute.

The now famous Toyota Production System, or Toyota Way, shifted the focus of workers from a specific job to their place in the big picture. Machines were retooled to have more than one function, and employees were encouraged to continually rethink how their job could be done better.

Toyota became the largest automaker in the world last year, a success many attribute to its approach to management and production.

Lowell said kaizen may not have taken off so forcefully in the public sector without the pressure of economic hard times.

“When times are good, you don’t worry whether you produce a lot of non-value-added work, but when times are tough and resources get scarce, you want to make sure you’re using resources wisely,” he said.