Water

Continuous Improvement and Benchmarking (CIB) involves collecting, analyzing, and comparing key performance data of water and sanitation utilities and, on the basis of analysis, developing a strategy and work program to improve specific aspects of a utility’s performance.

This program seeks to help utilities establish internal processes and build skilled teams to collect, analyze, and measure their services and then compare their performance and service practices against those of other utilities. This yields sufficient insights to enable the utility teams to identify improvement opportunities, craft change proposals, and then drive their implementation to achieve better results.

Simply put, the change processes and skills to achieve change is the continuous improvement part, while benchmarking provides comparative information that can be used to craft change proposals.

To date, CIB workshops have been conducted for each of the water utilities networks, designed to build staff capacity for the process and provide guidance on institutionalizing CIB in the organization. About a hundred utility personnel attended these sessions. Member utilities have also agreed to participate in the WOPs’ CIB program—SAWUN: 21 utilities, SEAWUN: 17 utilities, and CASCWUA: 11 utilities.

Continuous improvement (CI), as a technique, provides a structured process to arrive at improvements that will improve a service in respect of its outputs and outcomes.

The CI technique involves:

1. Management introduction and commitment
2. Service focus
3. Prioritize services for improvement
4. Plan the CI project
5. Form and train the teams
6. Define the service
7. Map the processes
8. Measure performance
9. Analyze the problems
10. Benchmark the service
11. Develop improvements
12. Implement improvements
13. Monitor performance

View CI technique details and materials

CI is also a culture. A CI culture is the desire and behavior within all staff, management and stakeholders to pursue continuous improvement in service delivery. This desire and behavior is manifested by managers developing CI project nominations, allocating budget resources to complete CI projects, participating in CI projects, meaningful consultation with all stakeholders and staff and customers accepting change.

View related materials on CI Culture

• Metro Cebu Water District: Key Performance Indicators Manual [ PDF ]