States look to Japan for example in efficiency

COLUMBUS, Ohio | The time it takes to get a complaint decided at Ohio’s 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.

A growing number of cash-strapped states are attacking bulky, frustrating and time-consuming bureaucracies with a Japanese weapon: the notion of “kaizen,” or continuous improvement.

“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.

Kaizen is a way of thinking that diagrams a job step by step, 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.

“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.”

To get at the root of a problem, kaizen encourages people to ask “why” five times.

“You start to hear things like ‘Why are you doing that?’ ” Mr. Lowell said.

In five-day 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 to get educated about the big picture of a process and discuss each little piece.

The targeted task is meticulously mapped, using colored sticky notes to identify junctures where paperwork must be filed, decisions made, sign-offs obtained. The results emerge as a complex network, stretching sometimes across an entire conference room wall. Then the participants set to work to eliminate most of what’s there.

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

“For me, it was exciting,” the 12-year state employee said. “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 kaizen. By this year, 29 states’ environmental agencies had 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 success.

“You cannot filibuster, you cannot stall. You look at this thing and say ‘OK, justify that,’ ” Mr. Wall said.

Mental light bulbs pop on. Epiphanies are experienced.

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