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Top consultancy firm Vanguard has steered Edinburgh City Council (ECC) towards its second service efficiency award after helping to rejuvenate the city’s gully cleaning process.

The local authority will battle it out against a series of finalists in the Efficiency Category at the Association of Public Sector Excellence (APSE) awards after cutting its response time to fixing problem gullies reported by members of the public. The nomination follows on from ECC winning the Guardian Award last year for the work it did with Vanguard on improving its pothole repair service.

Prior to Vanguard’s involvement, it took the local authority an average of 154 days to respond to problem gullies.

However after studying the process for gully cleaning, a team of frontline city council workers, supported by Vanguard, reduced this reactive cleaning time to an average of 12 days; a 92% improvement.

The remarkable results were achieved thanks to Vanguard’s Systems Thinking method which helps service organisations to improve service whilst reducing costs.

Alison Angus, Business Improvement Consultant at Edinburgh City Council, said: “Vanguard taught us that we had to first study how the whole systems worked before deciding how best to make a change.  Additionally they showed us that systems like gullies and road repairs should be thought of as project environments. This led to a completely different way of managing the cleaning schedule and provided amazing efficiencies.”

Stuart Corrigan, Vanguard Scotland’s Managing Director, said: “When we first looked at Edinburgh City Council’s response time to gully problems reported by members of the public, it was clear that there could be improvements. Using our Systems Thinking method we helped Edinburgh City Council to find and eliminate the waste within these work processes and use its existing tools more efficiently. Vanguard is delighted that the Council have been rewarded for their hard work with this APSE award nomination.”