Streamlining the Budgeting and Purchasing Process of Public Safety Departments - Research Paper Example

? Benchmarking Research Paper Public sector departments are often under pressure to improve performance and at the same time control expenditure growth. Public safety departments often face budgetary pressures, with citizens demanding that public sector department be made more accountable for what they achieve with taxpayers’ money. Benchmarking can successfully address these concerns and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the budgeting and purchasing process within the departments. Benchmarking can be employed to identify significant differences in the manner in which public safety departments manage and utilize the budget. This aids public sector departments to challenge the way they do things and utilize their finite resources better, which may have significant impacts on public sector outcomes. The paper explores key institutional drivers that may contribute to enhancing public sector efficiency on aspects such as benchmarking (performance information) and its role in the budget process. Benchmarking Research Paper Introduction Benchmarking infers the process of gauging one’s business processes and performance metrics to other industry bests or best practices. The term refers to the incessant process for monitoring and learning from the work processes, products, or services of other organizations appreciated as representing the best practices, in the effort of process improvement. Benchmarking is a tool that aids to enhance the efficiency of business processes or to minimize the output costs. The benchmarking of processes, such as budgeting and purchasing, avails organizations with the necessary information regarding how competently the services are provided to the community. Benchmarking avails a prospect to discover the best practices for service delivery within the public sector departments (Zairi, 2001). This complements the philosophy of commitment to continuous improvement into the delivery processes and methods in an effort to adjust and implement them in the departments. This is the core purpose for benchmarking. During the process of benchmarking, the management spotlights the best firms in their industry where comparable processes exist, and weigh the results and processes of those studied with the organization’s own results and processes. This facilitates learning on how well the targets perform and the business processes that explain why the target firms are successful. Public administration literature prominently cites three general approaches to benchmarking applicable to the public sector. These approaches include process-improvement benchmarking, strategic benchmarking, and target benchmarking. Benchmarking avails a tool for public sector managers to cope with the changing needs of their constituents. Process improvement benchmarking (corporate-style benchmarking) equates to looking at industry best practices and replicating or adapting them to fit one’s own organization (Curristine, Lonti & Journard, 2007). Targeting infers the process of the setting of goals and objectives to be attained via strategic planning actions. In this form of benchmarking, the present conditions are analyzed and then compared to a certain target (vision) or condition in the future that is desired. The Benchmarking Process The benchmarking process can be conceived as a four-phase process; plan, collect, analyze, and adapt. Benchmarking involves a number of activities, which include discovering the problem, establishing criteria for solutions, searching for promising practices, implementing promising practices and monitoring progress. Prior to engaging in benchmarking, it is crucial for managers to highlight the problem or activities that need to be benchmarked. The core activities identified may be essential to giving the organization a competitive edge (Stapenhurst, 2009). Establishing the criteria for solutions aid the organization to minimize omissions and errors and obtain a boost on its strategic goals, its primary business processes, and critical success factors. An honest appraisal of the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, and problem areas can be essential in fine-tuning the process. In the planning phase, the organization is expected to form a benchmarking team, analyze and document the processes, establish a scope of benchmarking study, come up with a purpose statement, establish criteria for benchmarking partners, highlight target benchmarking partners, outline a data collection plan and highlight how the implementation of improvements will be accomplished. Public safety departments have adopted diverse approaches to reforming key institutional arrangements and enhancing efficiency such as increasing devolution and decentralization, strengthening competitive pressures, transforming HRM arrangements, changing budget practices and procedures, and launching results-oriented approaches to budgeting and management. Increasing the application of performance information in the budget process is an essential initiative that is imperative in shifting the budgetary decision making focus away from inputs towards measurable results (Stapenhurst, 2009). Reforms to contain the growth in public spending and enhance spending outcomes can take diverse approaches such as transforming the budget and purchasing process to be more flexible and receptive to priorities, and strengthening competitive pressures among public services. Benefits of Benchmarking As a financial management strategy, benchmarking aids organizations to recognize paradigms of quality and performance in other organizations and implement them productively. Benchmarking is regarded as an essential tool for continuous improvement of quality. Benchmarking for best practices allows organizations to determine the criteria underlying performance, highlight certain problem areas for performance, enhance on the delivery and quality of services, make better informed decisions, expose to innovations and breakthroughs, minimize cost, or enhance productivity. Benchmarking facilitates preparation of an action plan critical to hastening and managing change. Benchmarking enables public safety departments to identify opportunities and set realistic but aggressive goals. As a result, the departments may be able to challenge their own internal paradigms. In addition, benchmarking allows a department to understand methods for enhanced processes and uncover strengths within the organization. Furthermore, through benchmarking, organizations learn from the leaders’ experiences, besides enabling the department to prioritize and allocate resources effectively. This ultimately contributes to performance enhancement. The common challenges associated with benchmarking include finding suitable partners, difficulties in comparing data, resource constraints, and staff resistance (Curristine, Lonti & Journard, 2007). The challenges may be orchestrated by data comparability, resource constraints, and ignorance. How to build Quality Organizations through Benchmarking Most organizations cite customer complaints in evaluating the quality of their services or products. However, this method of data collection can sometimes be skewed significantly by overzealous citizens. Benchmarking can be essential in influencing the quality of products and services. Measuring quality constitutes evaluating the present level of performance according to expected standards. Quality measurement can be divided into three essential areas; quality assessments, quality monitoring, and external evaluation of quality. Enhancing quality incorporates applying appropriate standard protocols to narrow the gap between the present and expected levels of quality as outlined by the standards (Stapenhurst, 2009). This can be attained through employment of quality management tools such as benchmarking. The quality improvement approaches are directed at addressing system deficiencies, enhancing strengths, and functional processes. The process of benchmarking generates an immense amount of data, which can be employed successfully to describe, appraise, and improve the quality. Importance of Streamlining the Process for Budgeting and Purchasing in Public Safety Department Public sector departments often face severe decline in revenues, which can lead to a significant funding gap in the public sector expenditures. This may create serious sustainability issues in financing of public safety department obligations, and that is crucial to how the departments act. Benchmarking the process of budgeting and purchasing may lead to enhanced efficiencies, greater effectiveness, and economies, especially in aiding to overcome the projected severe revenue reductions to ensure that tax is spent efficiently and effectively. Benchmarking aids in enhancing the setting of objectives by availing public safety departments with an opportunity to clarify objectives (Keehley & Abercrombie, 2008). Benchmarking is a useful tool for setting priorities over the short and medium term and can clarify the results expected from the public sector. The process also enhances the monitoring of performance (benchmarking as a signalling device). Benchmarking provides a mechanism for monitoring a public safety department’s performance and progress. Streamlining the process of budgeting and purchasing requires examination of an agency’s constitutional and statutory activities, functions, programs, duties and responsibilities so as to determine which of the examined activities, functions, programs, services, duties, and responsibilities can be (a) streamlined, (b) eliminated, (c) consolidated, (d) outsourced, or (e) privatized in an effort to minimize expenditure. Streamlining of the budget and purchasing process also requires targeting agencies whose activities, programs, functions, or services can be consolidated or eliminated, besides identifying opportunities for privatizing and outsourcing present departmental activities, functions, services, or programs (Zairi, 2001). This requires an examination of the necessity and performance of activities, programs, functions, and services to ensure that they match the present performance standards effectively and efficiently. Impact of a Streamline Process for Budgeting and Purchasing on Accountability Over the years, there has been a renewed interest directed at ensuring that public safety department’s efforts are becoming more efficient, effective, and accountable. Benchmarking has significantly contributed to enhancing accountability to the public. In the contemporary organizations, accountability for public sector managers and officials is essential. Benchmarks must satisfy a number of criteria such as credibility, transparency, and practicality. Public sector managers and officials must be ready to answer questions regarding how well a department meets the needs of the community. Benchmarking and performance measurements are methods that can be employed to provide valid information to answer these questions (Zairi, 2001). Practical Application of Benchmarking and Quality Management Theory and Literature The focus of benchmarking is to enhance the ability to use standard metrics, assess performance objectively, prioritize improvement opportunities, identify what offers the greatest potential return on investment, and identify other organizations’ superior performance processes. Benchmarking has been at the heart of promoting excellence in marketing, manufacturing practices and streamlining budget and purchasing process within both the public and private sector, especially in aiding the Federal Government’s implementation of sound cost-effective practices. Benchmarking of budgeting and purchasing process within the public sector department propels breakthrough strategies that enable public safety departments to attain high performance and deliver real value to the public. When employed effectively, benchmarking can raise the bar for organizational performance, contribute to costs reduction, and enhance service levels. Case studies reveal that benchmarking has been at the centre of improvement of public sector service delivery (Keehley & Abercrombie, 2008). The criteria hinges on evaluating public sector that have similar responsibilities such as delivery of social services and public safety. The benchmarking of the department is mainly been achieved through the identification of benchmarking partners. Importance of Streamlining Budgeting and Purchasing Process The budgeting and purchasing process should be streamlined as this derives a number of benefits. The use of performance information aids to generate a sharper focus on results within the public sector department. Similarly, the employment of performance information avails more and better information regarding public safety goals and priorities. Furthermore, it encourages enhanced emphasis on planning and acts as a signalling device that avails key actors with details regarding what works. This enhances transparency by providing more and better information to the public, and bears the capability to enhance public management and efficiency (Keehley & Abercrombie, 2008). A review of different agencies within the U.S. who have employed benchmarking for streamlining the budgeting and purchasing process reveals that the agencies have derived positive results. Conclusion The introduction of benchmarking in budgeting and transaction process has yielded a greater emphasis on planning in management and budgeting, a move that has enhanced focus in policy design and delivery. The adoption of results focused approach enables the public safety department managers to ask fundamental, strategic questions concerning the delivery of services. This requires a continuous monitoring of certain process performance with a select group of benchmarking partners to ensure that they match with the industry’s best practices. Benchmarking is at the heart of enhancing transparency by increasing access to information within the public sector. With the changing and dynamic environment, public sector managers and leaders should look beyond their jurisdiction for trends and benchmarks from related public entities. References Curristine, T., Lonti, Z. & Journard, I. (2007). Improving public sector efficiency: Challenges and opportunities. OECD Journal on Budgeting 7 (1). pp. 1-41. Keehley, P. & Abercrombie, N. (2008). Benchmarking in the public and nonprofit sectors: Best practices for achieving performance breakthroughs. New Jersey, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Stapenhurst, T. (2009). The benchmarking book. Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann. Zairi, M. (2001). Benchmarking for best practice. Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann. Read More