The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Sustaining an Operational Excellence Program

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Sustaining an Operational Excellence Program

So you finally finished that big project, the one that simplified and improved a core process for your customers. Time to call it a day and move on, right? Nope not even close. Now the fun begins – you designed and implemented a better way to service your customers but how do you sustain that improved change over time and who is responsible for ensuring it continues to act the way the team intended. Never forget your customers will drive the demand for delivering faster, cheaper and with  quality. So even though the project has successfully completed there will always be more to do. Let's take a closer look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of sustaining an Operational Excellence Program. Click here to read the full Survey Report 2018/19.    

First let's discuss how to sustain the improvement to a core process you just implemented. Since you were successful we can assume you had the right champion, you affected the culture in the right way, the design team is basically still in place and you can measure how the process acts – great job! Don't  walk away just yet. Who is responsible for ensuring things will continue the way you left them? What happens if resources change, or the metrics don't continue to show the positive results first achieved or customers start to complain? This is where Operational Excellence puts on a second hat to maintain and enforce the good work of the project team. Click here to read more Articles on The Global State of Operational Excellence: Critical Challenges & Future Trends - Research Report 2018/19.

The "Ugly"

It can get pretty “Ugly” down in the trenches when customers don't receive the output expected. Complaints come in, products are returned, procedures may slow down producing inventory or backlogs – all because the process once thought enhanced is not working as designed. You have just experienced a common occurrence of all processes. Since you did not set yourself up to sustain the success of the enhanced process implementation, you're lost on what to do or even worse reverting back to old ways.

The "Bad"

On the flip side maybe things are “Bad” but not catastrophic, after-all you do have measures to identify a leading problems, your resource are in place to identify the root cause of the issue and the Operational Excellence team is still around. So worse case you present the data and facts to the OpEx team and say we need your help to get us back on track. Of course the OpEx team has quiet a bit of free time to help – right?

The "Good"

So let's talk about the “Good” - the implementation has taken place but at the same time the project was executing part of the plan is dedicated to sustaining the improvement. I call this step E.L.F. as an easy way to remember the key activities to maintain the good work that was executed. Education, Leadership & Followup. Pretty simple to learn but harder to do. A lot happens behind the E.L.F. Principles that can ensure less headaches then needed. Let's break it down further.

Education

The process workers are educated in the new procedures so it's time to cross train the team and managers, knowledge is needed on how to identify and handle good vs bad variation, education also comes in the form of training for new people. Part of education is also for the rest of the organization to hear the success and gain awareness of how changes might affect their operations.

Leadership

You had a sponsor and a project leader but chances of them being their after the project are low. Now you need an embedded leader in some cases called a process owner who is responsible to ensure the new changes continue, understand what to do if issues occur, together with the team be able to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable variations, handle and / or escalate customer complaints and overall own the continued success of the process. The buck stops here! They are accountable for both the good and bad of the processing. The ownership is now part of their performance goals.

Followup 

Metrics, who is producing them and analyzing the results? Introduce a customer feedback loop that helps the team determine if additional changes are needed? Setup periodic reviews with the Operation Excellence team to determine if a new project should be established based on results from the measurement system or feedback from customer or internal stakeholders.

If you can do the upfront work to put this in place, you have now come full circle on the continuous improvement life cycle. This becomes another leg that sustains the OpEx project portfolio and ensures a continued healthy relationship with the process teams. Following these steps provides the organization with a continual stream of projects to maintain in addition to new projects identified that need help. The portfolio will be remain active, relevant and can be aligned to the corporate strategy over time.