The Challenge
The City of Richmond is striving to be the most appealing, liveable and well managed community in Canada. To support this vision, the City sought to improve processes within Fleet Operations and Hydrant Maintenance, to ensure that the City always fulfils the needs of its citizens. Maintenance processes have experienced rapid changes over the past decade with the introduction of new tools, systems and processes, but some legacy processes had not evolved with these changes. Propel Solutions was engaged by the City to assist with modernizing these processes through Preventative Maintenance to improve capacity across the organization, review the roles of staff within the department to leverage technology, and identify opportunities to optimize the City’s Fleet management.
The Objective
- Process Review: Propel conducted a comprehensive review of the current processes within Fleet Operations and Hydrant Maintenance. Working with key stakeholders, our consultants mapped 14 processes in their current states and facilitated critique sessions with staff to identify opportunities within their areas. Propel conducted process observations with hydrant mechanics, fleet mechanics and fleet administration staff.
- Develop Method Changes: Over 30 method changes were developed that would increase communications throughout the organization, reduce break-fix through improved preventative maintenance practices, provide greater inventory control, leverage systems, and improve the Fleet reserve model and lifespan of assets.
- Development of a Management Toolkit: Propel developed scheduling tools for each of the areas to assist the Supervisors to forecast volumes of work, plan resources and improve on-time completion of work. A route planner was developed to optimize hydrant servicing across the City.
- 5S and Shop Layouts: Quick 5S events were facilitated by Propel in each of the areas to improve work environments. Additionally, new layouts were designed for each shop to maximize space and streamline
- Daily Reporting of Results: Key Performance Indicators were developed by Propel to measure performance in quality, productivity, schedule attainment and speed of service. Daily operating reports were installed to communicate results and problem solve variances on a daily, weekly and yearly basis.
The Result
The Business Process Review provided the City with the data and tools to achieve process and service improvements through clearly defined roles and responsibilities and standardization of processes. As a result of the process implementations, Supervisors have greater visibility into their operations, enabling management to proactively predict and identify potential problems.
