Get on Offense: 8 Principles to Achieve Operational Excellence

In today’s increasingly competitive environment, improvements can’t take years to yield results. Instead, companies need to jump their performance quickly, in a year or even months. The key is to set a destination for improvement efforts. Rather than a goal like reduced inventory or lead time, the destination should be Operational Excellence, which is when “each and every employee can see the flow of value to the customer, and fix that flow before it breaks down.” When an organization achieves Operational Excellence, the result won’t simply be waste elimination or improved efficiency but real business growth.

Read More: 8 Principles to Achieving Operational Excellence

Here’s how it works.

When a company achieves Operational Excellence, the end-to-end flow throughout the operation will be self-healing, or autonomous, and deliver the product or service seamlessly day in and day out. That’s because the employees working in the flow can tell if it’s normal or abnormal and fix it on their own. Consequently, management will no longer have to hold status meetings, send emails chasing information or take other actions to intervene and fix the flow. Instead, managers can spend their time on offense, or activities that generate business growth. That means they can work more closely with product development on innovation, visit customers to understand how the operation can better support their needs, and more.

The key to setting up an organization for perpetual business growth rather than continuous improvement is to design it that way by following a set of principles and guidelines – and not by brainstorming. Operational Excellence is not a concept but an achievable state with a roadmap to get there. In this white paper, we share the step-by-step process organizations can follow to achieve Operational Excellence and real results.

Read More: Lean Six Sigma Resources

Culture Transformation in Operational Excellence