From left, DIBBS winner Felipe “Gen” Gonzalez, Jr., Supervisors Dave Roberts and Ron Roberts, DIBBS winners Philip Larson and Julieta Espiritu, Chairwoman Dianne Jacob, and Supervisors Greg Cox and Bill Horn.
There had to be a faster way to crunch the numbers.
Felipe “Gen” Gonzalez Jr. was new on the job as an associate accountant at the Department of Child Support Services. He noticed how much time and energy it took for his colleagues on the audit team to check figures on cases. They would type and re-type the numbers into calculators, using the copy and paste functions over and over again. They would then check one another’s work.
“There was a large possibility for human error,” said Gonzalez, who was recently promoted to Audits and Contract Monitoring Manager.
Not only that, Gonzalez thought cutting down on all the copying and pasting might be a better way to work – ergonomically speaking.
For that, Gonzalez was among a handful of employees recognized by the Board of Supervisors Tuesday morning as the 2013 winners of the Do It Better By Suggestion (DIBBS) Program. Begun in 1958, the program encourages employees to look for ways to save the County money and time by rewarding them with a portion of the anticipated savings.
The six employees recognized received between $50 and $2,513.50 for their suggestions. In addition to Gonzalez, who received $1,000, they include:
-Julieta Espiritu, a Probation Aide with the Probation Department, won $50 for her suggestion to use an electronic worksheet to collect client information and store it on a shared drive, saving Probation Officers time gathering information for their cases.
-Andrew Gerdeman, a Senior Protective Services Worker for the Health and Human Services Agency, won $241.50 for his suggestion to purchase monthly parking passes instead of daily tickets at a parking lot near the Hall of Justice. The idea is expected to save the County several thousand dollars annually.
-Philip Larson, a Senior Electronic Security and Systems Technician, and Rick Derkatz, an Electronic Security & Systems Technician, of the Department of General Services, each received $2,513.50 for their suggestion to replace telephone lines that connect to building fire and burglar alarms and monitoring stations with radio transmitters. Eliminating more than 400 phone lines saves the County $45 per line, or thousands of dollars.
-Joel Madero, an Election Worker Specialist with the Registrar of Voters, received $1,000 for his suggestion to update the process for verifying voter addresses in newly reapportioned or redistricted precincts. The improved process cuts down on manual data entry errors, as well as the time it takes to review and correct addresses and the staff time needed for the work.
In Gonzalez’s case, his manager at the time, Brenda Jaeger-Das, said she had asked him to look into the process and “clean up the form” used for the financial auditing.
He “went above and beyond” what she had asked, coming up with suggestions on how to make it better, she said.
Gonzalez said he was surprised but thrilled to win.
For more information or to submit an idea for the DIBBS program, visit the DIBBS page on InSite.
