AWWA ACE61804

Akron Public Utilities Bureau (APUB) is redesigning its business practices, technology, and organizational structure in order to improve service levels and become more competitive. One fundamental business change has been to develop empowered work teams, a strategy which prescribes that the staff closest to the work should help decide how it is executed, as long as the means chosen remain within APUB's predefined performance guidelines. Numerous benefits have been achieved from the new organizational structure. The implementation has also been challenging due to: extent of organizational change; number of employees impacted; communication challenges in a 24/7 operation; work practice traditions developed over 75 years; and, aging workforce not comfortable with change. APUB engaged EMA to help with implementation of the new organization structure. EMA utilized PinPoint, a resource loading tool developed by the firm to capture APUB's existing workload and illustrate it in a clear, logical manner. This enabled APUB to analyze and redefine the "right" work needed to support optimized business processes. As a result, APUB was able to: eliminate work that was not value-added; reduce tasks that provide low value; create new value-added work tasks; and, develop up-to-date standard operating procedures. The resource loading tool provided APUB with a road map to help redistribute the work to the new work teams. Includes figures.