Frontenac County Council

Jeff Green | Sep 10, 2014

Emotional council to consider naming conference room after Clayton - Sept. 3

Just two days after Warden Bud Clayton died, emotions were running high at a Committee of the Whole meeting of Frontenac County Council.

Councilors paid tribute to Clayton at the start of the meeting, noting his contribution to improvements at the county, his work for Pine Meadow Nursing Home, and his commitment to North Frontenac Township.

Deputy Warden Dennis Doyle then suggested that the conference room on the main floor of the county offices, which used to be used as a council chamber in the first few years following municipal amalgamation, and is now used as a committee and staff meeting room, be named the Bud Clayton room.

A number of councilors said they would support such a proposal.

Councilor John McDougall suggested that the proposal be deferred for a couple of weeks for council to consider any implications there may be to the naming, and for Clayton's family to be consulted. Council agreed and the matter was deferred to the September 17 Council meeting.

Six Sigma on a lean

There have been a parade of consultants to meetings of Frontenac County over the years, but very few, if any, have a black belt.

Dale Schattenkirk, the CAO of Learning to See Consulting out of Regina, Saskatchewan, is the exception. His black belt is not in Karate, however; it is in Lean Six Sigma, and it is actually a Master Black Belt.

Lean Six Sigma is not a college fraternity; it is a managerial concept that results in the elimination of waste in work processes. It is a system that was adopted by large industrial corporations in the 1980s and 1990s and has been applied to the public sector in the last 15 years or so.

The goal of Lean Six Sigma is the elimination of eight kinds of waste in institutional settings: defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion, extra-processing, which are expressed in an acronym – DOWNTIME.

For a cost of $30,000, Shattenkirk brought a team to Frontenac County this summer to look at the county's procurement processes and at logistics within Frontenac Paramedic Services.

They found little to improve upon in the procurement end but as far as logistics within Frontenac Paramedic Services they found a number of what Schattenkirk called “opportunities to improve”.

Most of these have to do with better tracking of supplies used by paramedics on an ongoing basis, less extra driving by managerial and support staff to ensure supplies are in place, and better tracking of supplies to cut down on the amount of materials that end up being recycled because they reach their past due date before being used.

What Schattenkirk was more interested in talking about, however, was the work culture at Frontenac County, which impressed him.

“You guys are in a very good position in terms of quality improvement,” he said. “You have a group that is committed to improving the operation at all levels of the organization.”

He suggested training staff to do quality improvement, using the LEAN system to train a few key members of both the management and staff teams to a LEAN yellow and green belt level.

“The idea is to have everyone in the county actually engaged in how the county runs,” he said. “Within 18 months you should be completely independent. You won't need jokers like us to telling you what to do.”

He also said that the money charged by his company is offset by savings, either in “light green or dark green dollars” - light green dollars referring to time saved by staff that can be used for more productive work, and dark green referring to cash savings.

A proposal to extend the contract with Learning to See Consulting will be considered by Council later this month.