Business Excellence
In these challenging times, Council must ensure that it is operating at peak performance. Benchmarking against other smaller rural Councils indicates that Ararat Rural City Council performs well and is statistically a “low cost” council. On an employee costs as a percentage of adjusted total expenses, Ararat was at the median for small rural councils at 38 per cent.
Australian Business Excellence Framework
Ararat Rural City Council has committed to implementing the Australian Business Excellence Framework across the organisation to drive this improvement. Council must strive to improve its operational performance to ensure the community continues to obtain best value services.
This Framework assists organisations by focusing improvements into eight categories:
Leadership
Lead by example, provide clear direction, build organisational alignment and focus on sustainable achievement of goals
Continuous Improvement
Develop agility, adaptability and responsiveness based on a culture of continual improvement, innovation and learning.
Customers
Understand what markets and customers value, now and into the future and use this to drive organisational design, strategy, products and services.
Information and Knowledge
Improve performance through the use of data, information and knowledge to understand variability and to improve strategic and operational decision making.
Systems Thinking
Focus on continuously improving business systems and their associated processes.
Corporate and Social Responsibility
Behave in an ethically, socially and environmentally responsible manner.
People
Develop and value people’s capability and release their skills, resourcefulness and creativity to change and improve the organisation.
Sustainable Results
Focus on sustainable results, value and outcomes.
The most cost efficient method of service delivery is to get it right the first time. Driving quality up actually drives unit cost down. This is the Business Excellence secret that allows us to achieve more with less and deliver best value to our community.
Council is moving to embed the principles of this framework within its organisation.
The Council Plan reflects this intent.
