EON Blog

There is certainly no shortage of content on operational excellence (OpEx) and continuous improvement (CI). Unfortunately, many companies that seek improvement never get far enough in their efforts to experience sustainable change.

Is your company's OpEx efforts stuck in neutral? Are you tired of trying to implement meaningful improvements and failing to make them stick?

If so, it's time to assess the health of your company's lean management system (LMS).

To some extent, the throughput of your healthcare facility can be measured based on “bodies on beds.” As in hotel operations, if you’re seeing low occupancy of your beds, you may not be pulling in the required revenue to cover your fixed operating costs.

Given that consideration, one of the key efforts that you may need to pursue to improve operational performance is to get a new patient into a bed or room as quickly as possible after the prior patient is able to be discharged. This process is known as patient room turnover.

Many organizations have started to recognize the benefits of achieving operational excellence, which is the process of  building a sustainable competitive advantage through operations management. While leaders understand that operational excellence can have a positive effect on their organizations, there's still some confusion around measuring the success of their operational excellence programs.

Ideally, a visitor to a hospital or other healthcare facility never needs to think about patient placement. This important process involves the logistical infrastructure and actions that come together smoothly to help make the patient’s “visit” effective, efficient, and even pleasant from start to finish.

It’s a powerful force that works behind the scenes at the world’s most successful companies. Every day, it fosters evolution and innovation. It’s continuous improvement, a process that’s essential for long-term business success.

In our webinar, How to Run Effective Meetings with EON, we tackled the different methods that EON users can utilize to improve both the planning and management processes related to three types of meetings: the 1:1 meeting, the team meeting, and the leadership review. 

Having a motivated workforce is one of the key requirements for an organization’s success, for both operational excellence in day-to-day efforts and effective implementation of improvement programs. Achieving motivation ties to reinforcement, ideally generating a self-sustaining cycle. The more you do, the more reinforcement you get, the more you want to do…

“Hey, we’re starting the Operational Excellence initiative, and you’ve been identified as a stakeholder!”

Ideally, your company meetings offer an opportunity for a valuable exchange of ideas between leaders and employees, with plenty of time to discuss the issues that are impeding the company's progress and lots of actionable suggestions that will resolve these problems quickly and efficiently. 

I’ve got a job for you. Drive my car from Key West, Florida, to Portland, Oregon. You must:

1. Do this work as fast as possible
2. Don’t waste time
3. Stay safe
4. Don’t break any laws

By the way, my car doesn’t have a dashboard; only a steering wheel, gas and brake peddles, a clutch, and manual shift. Good Luck.

Futurist and author Joel A. Barker once said, “Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to operational excellence (OpEx), many organizations can be described as having “action without vision” leaving the impression that the OpEx function is “just passing the time.”

If you’re like me, the pursuit of personal fitness and health can be quite an interesting journey, much like an improvement journey. It's filled with peaks and valleys (overweight/underweight, strong/weak, tired/rested, toned/um, not so toned).

When I check in on my progress at some logical interval (beach season, New Years, etc.) I discover that I've basically reverted back to whatever tried and true method I know best in order to make a change. Things like cutting carbs, cardio, lifting heavy things, etc.