Border management and public safety agencies from around the world are improving processes and reaping the rewards.
UK: Her Majesty’s Prison Service
Her Majesty’s Prison Service (HMPS) HQ operations account for £155 million, 8.4 percent of the prison service spend in the United Kingdom. The board recognized the need to introduce a rigorous efficiency and value improvement program to produce a 15 percent cut in expenditure and a significant rise in the value HQ provides to the operational arm of the service.
Accenture worked with the HQ team to help plan its change and human performance work, to support specific change projects as well as the project and program management elements of the work. Accenture has developed program and project management tools, working alongside HQ project managers to help them analyze the "as is" situation, benchmark their performance and to design a more efficient operation. Accenture will also support the implementation planning and delivery over the coming months. The work has yielded £20 million in savings and a significant improvement in HQ services to the prison operations.
France: Penitentiary Administration (Direction de l’administration pénitentiaire)
As part of a 2007 strategic audit, the French government discovered that its prison system was facing an unprecedented increase in prisoners by approximately 30 percent into 2012. It also found other challenges including outdated real estate and overcrowding, staff absenteeism and low success rates in rehabilitation. In 2008, Accenture helped the ministry project team analyze the penitentiary administration’s main mission and objectives, evaluating costs and proposing reforms.
By examining processes ranging from forecast modeling of prison population to procurement practices to health management, Accenture was able to identify significant cost savings, including 3 to 8 percent of staffing costs and 3 percent of overall expenditures. In addition, by reassessing prison alternatives, the administration was able to free up prison capacity by 10,000 additional spots. Accenture also identified opportunities for the administration to improve service by closing old, obsolete and expensive prisons and create new prisons of optimum size for operational costs.