With the release of our 6-part report series, ‘Operational Excellence: Snapshots’, we wanted to hear some thoughts from our resident experts. Our final part of the series, ‘Operational Excellence: Final Insights', asked 150+ OpEx professionals for some final thoughts on the state of the industry, and the areas they felt urgently needed greater focus.

With this in mind, we asked Dr. Mathias Kirchmer, BPM Expert & Insights Contributor, to share his thoughts on the report.

It is great to see that “Customer Experience” and “Strategy Execution” have been identified as the top two priorities for business transformation and operational excellence. At the end of the day, we live for our clients. Therefore, everything should be about making their experience as positive as possible. A business strategy and its execution need to create and organization that meets and exceeds customer expectations to enable the short and long-term success. Other areas, like leadership, culture, agility or innovation support those top priorities.

Everybody talks about “superior customer experience” or “powerful business strategies”. But few people know how to make it happen. The questions shown in “Final Insights” are very typical for many organizations. Most of those organizations are able to develop ambitious strategies and related goals. But few of them deliver on those goals. In a recent analyst study I read that only 13% of organizations meet their yearly strategic goals. The other 87% are busy in the last quarter of a fiscal year to come up with explanations why they did not deliver on their plans. This will become even worse with the all present digitalization. Companies try to benefit from the opportunities of our digital world but they are not prepared to realize the full business potential of available digital technologies.

This is an opportunity for the next generation of business process management (BPM). BPM becomes the discipline of strategy execution. A process-led execution approach is by definition enterprise wide and customer-focused. Hence, it is perfectly suited for driving a successful strategy execution. It helps answering the questions about HOW to get things done. The BPM-Discipline defines the right focus to make a strategy happen, identifies the appropriate improvement approaches and ensures sustainable progress. It enables a value-driven digitalization that is part of the larger strategy-execution initiative.

The new BPM-Discipline drives strategy execution in a digital world. It holds the ability to answer the questions summarized in this “Final Insights” report – and more. 

View Mathias' Contributor Profile