Embracing Efficiency: How Local Governments Can Eliminate Inefficiencies and Empower Teams

Efficiency is achieved when the number of results acquired outweigh the level of effort put in. Unfortunately, for many municipalities, there is an insufficiently low number of outcomes despite an immense number of resources being used. This has led to an influx of noisy nonvalue worki.e. sorting and managing forms, and an ever growing backlog, to distract and overwhelm staff with unnecessary labour. The consequences to the organization are huge, as it can effect moral, trust and even bring about negative financial costs. 

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A High Profile Example

For example, Nike, a well-known athletic brand, encountered problems in the early 2000s, struggling with inventory tracking, which consequently lead to roughly $100 million in lost sales and significant reputational harm due to customer dissatisfaction. Outdated filing systems caused poor inventory management, leading to communication problems, overstocking or stockouts, wasted resources, and dissatisfied customers. Multiple inefficiencies worked in a domino effect, hindering the business’s capacity to succeed.  

Efficiency in Local Government Operations

Many councils experience issues regarding their filing and communication systems especially across different departments: 

  • Overlapping arrangements 
  • Duplication or exclusion of data records 
  • Structure and misalignment flaws 

These inefficiencies arise from inconsistent submission methods for requests, complaints, and forms (PDF, Word, Excel, email, or paper), hindering interdepartmental consistency and coordination. 

These challenges can be overcome by using an automated  system—such as the ones offered by Government Frameworks. With a more streamlined and organized approach to processes and workflows, everything becomes more manageable freeing up staff to refocus on their core responsibilities.  

Adding storage space to adapt for ever-growing data demands can be difficult and costly. It may not always be physically possible to add storage to an existing facility. It may mean increasing the physical space where servers are stored, upgrading environmental controls, additional power supply and upgraded software and licensing to manage additional storage.

Scaling with cloud storage is usually based on a pay as you go subscription model. Adding more storage is often as simple as upgrading your subscription, and can be automatically implemented based on need.

Other ways to improve workflow and manage inefficiencies

  1. Identify any inefficiencies like overlapping tasks or processes that hinder the workflow and simplify or streamline them. 
  2. Create consistent procedures to reduce miscommunication and confusion and increase reliability.  
  3. Ensure tasks are correctly allocated to people with the specific skills and capacity to do them.  
  4. Encourage cross-departmental collaboration to ensure speedy completion of tasks and avoid duplicated efforts.
  5. Conduct regular process reviews. 
     

The Need for Transparency and Accountability

When there is no clear system following up on reports, things can easily slip through the cracks. Tasks are smothered by others, forgotten and only remembered until they’ve turned into much bigger issues, and both transparency and accountability to suffer as a result.  

Government Frameworks provide organizations with the tools and platform like FARMER/Process Pro, to overcome these challenges and help maintain organization. We act as a helpful guide—making it easy to assign tasks to specific roles and track progress from start to finish. We help build clear process maps that allow all stakeholders to overlook the progress of the task, identify collaborators and responsibilities, which steps are automated, and which require manual intervention and approval. Our processes keep everything on track, visible, and easier to manage.  

Empowering Local Government Employees

Government Frameworks systems are designed to guide and support you as you identify and overcome inefficiencies. We provide resources and solutions to benefit stakeholders across your organization, ensuring processes run smoothly from top to bottom. The result is restoring balance to your team allowing them to work efficiently. 

At Government Frameworks, our focus is always on supporting the growth of the communities and organizations that we work with. As such, we’re committed to empowering individuals through regular, ongoing training sessions throughout the entire subscription period. Ongoing training provides employees with the skills and understanding that allow them to use the system to its full potential, maximizing efficiency for themselves, and the entire organization. Sessions are designed to familiarize users with the software and ensure they become more confident with it and thus, can get the most value from it as their company evolves.  

Inefficiencies can creep up into any organization, introducing a ton of unpredictable and unexpected obstacles—bottlenecks hindering your workflow, redundancies creating an influx of unnecessary work, and systems that don’t keep up with the evolving needs of your municipality. However, it’s important to remember that every issue has a solution. As a global company trusted by clients around the world, we provide proven solutions that work. With FARMER we combine our expert knowledge with integral local insights to ensure our services bring lasting value to every organization we partner with.  

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Amy Underwood

Business Development

Are you starting to see inefficiencies creep into your organization? We can help you identify and solve them. 

Contact us today and we can show you how! 

 
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Angelique Van Der Walt

Taking the leap. Average to extraordinary.

Ready to get started?

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