The costly business of repairing potholes - while wrestling with gaps in public expenditure budgets - has prompted a group of highways authorities to adopt a new lean approach to deliver an improved, value for money service.

Telford and Wrekin, Shropshire, Warwickshire and Herefordshire Council have enlisted the help of business consultants to reduce waste, improve efficiency and save more than £1 million each year on their collective annual pothole repairs bill.

They will work with Habanero Business Consulting on an eight months transformation programme starting this month/early November. It follows the consultancy’s success in a pilot scheme with Walsall Council which saved £400,000 a year on highway repairs.

Habanero won a competitive tender commissioned by Improvement and Efficiency West Midlands, the regional improvement and efficiency partnership, to work with the councils using their specialist systems thinking skills and expertise to develop a system thinking method to transform the way the service is delivered to the public.

Keith Gordon, Assistant Director Efficiency and Delivery, Improvement and Efficiency West Midlands, said: “The councils are willing and enthusiastic and have identified that lean processes can make a real and significant difference. This is an opportunity to deliver improved services and cost reductions at the same time as improving morale and motivation internally and eliminating the waste from the process for the customer.

“With the public purse strings getting pulled tighter and greater pressure on spending, it is more important than ever to manage our road assets as efficiently as we can. This is a great opportunity to further cascade the previous LEAN successes across the region.

“Following a competitive tender exercise Habanero demonstrated they understood our needs and came with a proven track record having delivered a similar project in Walsall. We expect this programme to generate up to 20-25% of savings or added efficiencies.”

Reactive highways repairs are not solely about potholes, they also include signs, lights, and fences. They are the main focus however and a major concern for the travelling public, especially after the damage caused to roads last winter, the most severe for years. In 2008 England’s potholes repairs bill was more than £48 million.

In Habanero’s project with Walsall new ways of working were developed to streamline processes. Working with both Walsall Council and Tarmac Ltd staff, improvements included making permanent pothole repairs first time around instead of doing a temporary one first, cutting duplicate inspector roles, creating a dedicated fast response team to carry out emergency works and issuing inspectors with handheld devices so they could report problems on-the-spot instead of having to return to the office.

Ralph Stobart, Principal Consultant of Habanero, said the new programme with the four authorities would help them to look at services from the customer’s point of view, so they can challenge how they currently work and identify what creates value for the customer and eliminate waste.

He explained: “We do not go in and sit in workshops, telling people what works and what doesn’t and imposing solutions. We work with organisations, with leaders and frontline staff, and help them look at each part of their process from start to finish and see it from what their customers require.

“Our job is to help them see things differently and for those involved to identify what improves services to customers and what adds no value. They find the answers for themselves. They can experiment with new ways of doing the work, remove the ‘waste’ steps and carry on experimenting so they fundamentally improve the whole system end to end, rather than little chunks of it.

“By engaging the people in the system in this way they take ‘ownership’, the changes are sustainable and a culture develops of continually looking to improve.

Ralph said it was difficult to estimate how much would be saved by the programme but based on the results at Walsall he expected it to be more than £1 million a year.

A key part of the work will involve bringing the authorities together on a regular basis to help them learn and work together and thus create a forum for learning. The aim is for this forum, as well as the improvements within each authority, to continue long after the programme ends.