Operational Excellence (OE) is all about using your tools and engaging your team every day to make improvements that maximize customer value. It focuses on individual processes to find opportunities for enhanced efficiency. Operational Excellence is not specific to any job function and can be applied to any role within an organization to drive productivity, maximize value, and make your job easier!
Applying Operational Excellence to Your Organization
Lean methodology and Six Sigma each promote the flow of value to the customer through continuous process improvement within any organization.
The first step is to define the current state: identify the steps in the current workflow that contribute to your desired output and value. It’s important not to make assumptions – go to where the work is done, whether on the production floor or in the office, and spend time to observe and understand. After the process is defined, analyze any part that might be consuming resources but doesn’t directly contribute to the value (product or service) you are creating for your customer. It can be helpful to consider points in the process where the work stops or anywhere there are unnecessary steps or things are taking more time than desired. Ask yourself, how can your process be improved? Scrutinizing each step is important as oftentimes your workflow can be simplified in ways that you previously hadn’t considered.
Next, brainstorm improvement ideas that could be implemented to maximize efficiency and achieve flow within your process. Prioritize the ideas that are achievable and impactful, then define an improvement plan. Execute the plan, check the results to ensure your actions made a difference, then make any adjustments necessary. If the improvements were effective, consider how to sustain the gains. If the change didn’t work as well as planned, don’t give up! Consider what you’ve learned and make a new improvement plan.
We often have the mindset of “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” With this way of thinking, it is very easy to overlook opportunities to save extensive amounts of time and money! The Operational Excellence mindset challenges us to seek perfection rather than maintaining the status quo. In an ever-changing world, even if processes are operating without issue, there are new resources that are constantly being created to help make our lives easier. Because of this, it is always advantageous to analyze new resources and identify ways to maximize efficiency.
Implementing a culture of Operational Excellence will help your organization improve productivity and maximize value for your customers. With regular examination of your daily workflow, you will find that you are able to streamline many processes, saving your organization money and time along the way.
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