Improving Employee Separation Process
By Dennis Van Patter, CDOT Communications Office
August 20, 2014
When an employee separates from the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) employment for whatever reason – resignation, retirement, or termination - a series of administrative procedures is triggered. There are many details that must be completed, including benefit cutoff dates, determination of accurate final pay, and collecting of identification/access badges, to name just a few.
This is no small task because on average 36 employees separate from CDOT each month.
A Lean project that began in May of this year has taken a look at the separation process and has made several recommendations to streamline it and speed it up. Particularly in the area of pay and records, where CDOT uses SAP and the remainder of the state uses the Colorado Operations Resource Engine (CORE), coordination was required.
No one had really examined this process and establish timeframe benchmarks, so the project team took on that task. There was general agreement on the following three recommendations for improvement:
Get the submission of separation paperwork from division and/or regional offices on a more timely basis;
Revise Form 561, which deals with resignations, to capture information important for Human Resources, Risk Management, and Benefits; and
Change processes to utilize a variant in SAP regarding leave reconciliation.
All three have now been implemented. “Team members tested their new procedures/system in June, and will again in August. The results so far have been positive. Timeframes have improved by 50% due to reduced waiting time, and everyone seems satisfied with the results so far,” noted project leader Cheryl Wright.
CDOT Process Improvement Director Gary Vansuch noted that the project team has made a lot of progress in a short amount of time. “It’s only been about three and a half months, and already the key deliverables have been implemented,” he said. “When these folks held their rapid improvement event, they weren’t kidding about the ‘rapid’ part! I want to thank everyone on this team for their hard work and excellent results.”
The team continues to meet every two weeks to stay on track in preparation for more testing in August.
