Data quality of information

Let’s drill down into one of the most frustrating problems service charge teams experience; and that’s the data quality of information provided by the business. The sheer volume and amount of checking and ‘adjusting’ required on this data often overwhelms service charge teams and creates significant peaks in their workload.

The solution we have seen most organisations deploy is smarter checking, automated checking, or outsourced checking. Far from ideal.

A Lean organisation would look at the end-to-end process, and deploy a concept called ‘flow’ – if ‘flow’ were achieved in service charges, everyone in the organisation would be thinking about the impact of their actions on the next step of the process and the end result – so anyone recording data in the system that would ultimately be used for service charges would record it in a way that can easily be traced and presented to a resident. Sounds good right, but possibly a bit unrealistic for where you are now.

Short of achieving proper ‘flow’ we could deploy the concept of error proofing.  Rather than catching errors at the end of the process, when the data is being compiled, Lean thinking would advocate that first we try and prevent them occurring. This means putting mechanisms in place to stop the errors occurring. There are different levels of error proofing, so if preventing the error isn’t possible can we put things in place to catch or highlight the error as early in the process as possible. A rule of thumb is that the later the error is detected in a process, the greater the cost of correcting it.

Assuming you can’t prevent all the errors, and checking is still necessary, Lean also says that we should avoid batching work wherever possible and reduce the batch size as small as feasible until it is possible to achieve ‘single-piece-flow’. Practically this means that you should check your service charge data as frequently as possible, rather than batch it into an annual activity. Start by checking the data every month, it will reduce the burden on the team at their busiest time of the year, and you are more likely to get decent responses to any queries you raise with colleagues as the queries will be related to things that have happened more recently.