Michael Williams
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
I am responsible for the £26M Book Storage Facility at Swindon, with space to store 153 miles of books and currently holding 8.9 million items. I am interested in getting value for money and improving the impact of our services through evidence-based decision making.
Purpose:
Our environmentally controlled library warehouse stores 10 million collection items and its team of staff provides a delivery service to our students and researchers. Statistics were showing that the demand for the service was much higher than forecast at the design stage and, as a result, the operationally intensive environment had bottlenecks and backlogs which were affecting the service level agreements. It was clear that the staffing levels were inadequate to meet demand so we needed to capture data to enable evidence-based decision making to restructure and supplement staffing.
Design, methodology or approach:
Each of the activities undertaken by staff was observed and timed over extended periods which resulted in detailed measurements for each elemental task. For batch activities, items were counted to provide averages. Based on known demand for services we were able to extrapolate these measurements to model the demand on services and, therefore, the staffing requirement for a whole year. Holiday and sickness was taken into account enabling us to demonstrate the number of staff required across the range of activities.
Alternatives methods considered tracking the life cycle of requested items to gain an understanding of the time taken to complete a full cycle of the process to deliver an item to a reader and return it to the warehouse. With so many variables and the difficulty of obtaining data for items that had left the warehouse, this idea was not pursued.
Findings:
We were able to provide evidence to show that the levels of staffing were inadequate and two further full-time equivalent (FTE) staff were required. The data also highlighted specific areas that required higher and lower levels of resourcing than were currently provided.
Research or practical limitations or implications:
The evidence was used to make a convincing case to obtain additional resources to recruit two FTE staff. This was deployed as one full-time staff member and two part-timers as the evidence demonstrated that there was a specific time of the day (evenings) when activity intensity increased and, therefore, two additional people were required to supplement existing staffing at that time.
In areas identified as requiring lower levels of resourcing, we were able to redeploy staff from low intensity tasks to higher intensity activities.
Conclusions:
Operational backlogs and bottlenecks were removed and service levels agreements were met by restructuring staffing and supplementing it with additional resources. Unexpected benefits were subsequently observed: the team has benefited from variety in their work and the data provide convincing evidence of the team’s value which has improved motivation. The data has also supported performance management.
Originality and value:
The research was motivated by operational need in an environment where meeting service level agreements is a key performance indicator. The methods can be applied to many library activities and is especially applicable to repetitive or high intensity tasks. It is equally valuable in library operations where there is a perception that staffing levels are inadequate but it is not clear how additional staffing should be deployed.
Organisational issues , Services , Staff , Finance , Impact , Value , Data , Methods
