Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts has become one of the highest profile elected officials in America to advocate the use of Lean methodology among public officials, taking the initiative to instill Lean concepts and provide Lean training to state employees since taking office in January 2015.

In a recently published letter to Nebraska citizens, Ricketts praised state employees who have taken Lean concepts and put them into action. Ricketts wrote that changing the culture of a workplace, much less an entire state government, “isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s a large undertaking that requires focus, time and hard work.”

Along the way, Nebraska has become one of the leaders in applying Lean methodology to government.

Successes with Lean

In this first year in office, Ricketts created the Center of Operational Excellence (COE). The COE oversees the state’s Lean initiatives, striving to streamline operations, cut waste and provide better service to taxpayers.

The goal of the COE is to “instill a culture of continuous improvement throughout state government,” Ricketts wrote. He went on to note that the COE has been involved with 350 process improvement projects in 18 state agencies that have resulted in freeing up more than 300,000-man hours.

Some of the successes noted by the governor include the following.

  • Creating an online system for the Nebraska State Patrol (NSP) that allowed Nebraskans to renew concealed weapon permits online through the use of a fingerprint database. It saves residents an hour for each permit and has saved state patrol officers 6,300-man hours that can be spent “actively protecting Nebraskans,” according to Ricketts.
  • Reducing the wait time at the Department of Motor Vehicles from 29 minutes to eight minutes in a project in South Omaha that combines services from the DMV and the County Treasurer.
  • Reducing the time that people spent on hold when calling the state program that manages food stamps (SNAP) from 24 minutes to less than five minutes.

“Imagine being a parent in urgent need of resources to feed your family,” Ricketts wrote about the food stamp issue. “It’s unacceptable for anyone in this position to be stuck on the phone for a half hour or to be in limbo for months as an application is reviewed.”

Employees Trained in Lean

One of the main focuses of the COE is to train employees in Lean Six Sigma methodologies that can in turn be used to establish process improvement practices. According to the COE website, that has been accomplished at a remarkable rate.

The COE site reports the following number of Six Sigma belts have been earned by state employees.

  • White Belt – 12,799
  • Yellow Belt – 3,992
  • Green Belt – 23
  • Executive Green Belt – 124
  • Lean Certified Leader – 20

Each belt confers a different amount of knowledge and skill to those who earn the belt. You can read all about the different Six Sigma belt levels here.

How Nebraska Uses Lean

The COE also reported how they have implemented different projects across many different state agencies.

For example, ordering and receiving items for inmates in the state’s Lincoln Correctional Center once took 72 steps to accomplish. In total, an order took up 3.5 hours of staff time. Just delivering the orders to two housing units took a total of 16 hours. The state has removed 25 steps from the process and freed up nine staff hours per week.

In another project involving the NSP, the state looked for ways to improve the time spent on  “potential crimes involving Nebraska children using the internet (photos, videos, trafficking).” The state had a backlog of 90 cases. Each case also had an average lead of 16 days – more than six months in some cases. The state is still working on this project, but it has involved cutting down duplicate work and finding areas of waste.

In all these cases, the principles of Lean – cutting waste, finding what creates value for end users and what doesn’t – have come to play. But Ricketts said process improvement must continue to have long-term effects.

“I’m excited about these successes and the recognition we’ve received, but our work has only begun,” he wrote. “We still have big challenges in front of us. At the state, we will continue to explore ways to enhance operational excellence and strengthen our culture of continuous improvement.”