HBRC measures up with BASS model

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council has participated with six other regional councils to benchmark the operation of back-office functions in a project that focuses on efficiency gains and organisational improvement.

The regional council collective has adapted the Government’s Better Administrative & Support Services or BASS tool administered by The Treasury, to share information about human resources, finance, information & communications technology, property, procurement and other corporate services.

Andrew Newman, CEO of Hawke’s Bay Regional Council welcomes the results of this benchmarking model and the potential that the BASS approach has to deliver efficiency.

“HBRC is participating in this study to determine areas of efficiency, which is part of our continuous improvement process,” said Mr Newman.

“At this stage, the benchmark study results didn’t identify any areas where significant intervention or changes are required by our Regional Council but we continue to invest our focus in the process seeking business improvements where feasible.”

The project initiator, Mr Bill Bayfield, Chief Executive of Canterbury Regional Council, said “We wanted to benchmark our administrative and support services with other regional councils to improve performance and deliver better value to the public. We also wanted this partly because the community expects council services to be delivered efficiently and effectively, and partly in anticipation of legislative change in this area.”

“The results so far have been positive,” said Mr Bayfield, “and have focussed on costs and efficiency, rather than effectiveness. The quality of services being provided is also important to measure and is something we’ll look at benchmarking in future.”

The regional councils taking part in BASS are Bay of Plenty, Canterbury, Greater Wellington, Hawkes Bay, Horizons, Otago and Waikato.

“When we looked around for a suitable benchmarking approach, we were attracted to the Treasury’s BASS tool, which has benchmarked about 30 government agencies for the last three years,” said Mr Bayfield.

“It provides new transparency regarding costs, management performance, and highlights opportunities for improvement that were previously hidden” said Mr Bayfield.

“Early information allows us to compare the numbers. What we can’t do at this stage is compare and question the levels of service that are being provided. Fortunately, each council is participating openly in this exercise with the intent on improvement and is keen to now examine these results against levels of service that their communities expect.”

NOTE

Benchmarking involves looking outside the organisation to see how others achieve their performance levels and understanding the processes they use. The Treasury’s programme is based on international methods and comparator data from UK Audit Agencies, the American Productivity and Quality Centre, and The Hackett Group.

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