EON Blog

It’s best to establish a long-term strategy and stick with it rather than make frequent changes. After all, a strategy change can require additional resources and create confusion for both customers and employees. However, sometimes organizational strategy must change as a result of outside factors. Think of buggy whips after the invention of the car and photographic film after the invention of the digital camera.

I cringe to write bad advice in case someone misreads the headline and follows these suggestions. Oh well, here are Operational Excellence (OpEx) methods and actions people might suggest you follow, but you shouldn’t… Just don’t do it.

“Don’t worry about strategy. Just get started doing something.”

This has a couple kernels of substance; you do want to get engagement quickly and you can get started before every “t” is crossed and every “i” is dotted. However, the essence of the advice is contrary to operational excellence basics. Continuous improvement (CI) efforts must be aligned with strategy and must focus on delivering value. Have the strategy in mind rather than initiating teams willy-nilly just for the sake of saying you’re doing continuous improvement.

A critical component of operational excellence (OpEx) is gathering employee feedback. This feedback provides unique perspectives and insight into your organization that you can’t find elsewhere. It may include positive, negative, or neutral comments. Regardless of its leanings, use the information to make your organization better and more efficient.

As you begin a path to operational excellence, you’ll likely see the expression DMAIC. That’s simply an acronym that means:

If you’re a hands-on operational excellence practitioner or aspiring to become one, choosing your tactics for improvement efforts is probably where you start to get really excited. But wait! First, of course, you need to have your OpEx vision and strategy in place.  This includes identification of specific deliverables and metrics, the “what ” that you are committing to achieve in working with teams of operational resources.

Let's start with this ...

Upon implementing 5S, we MUST aspire to achieve a fundamental concept of Lean; reduce and eliminate waste.

"Oh... ok. Sure, that's right."

That's what they all say.

Standard work involves organizing all tasks in the best-known method and sequence, using the best combination of people, material, and resources to deliver consistent, timely, and repeatable results. This is one of the foundations of Lean, helping to deliver the predictable and consistent output upon which reliable processes and satisfied customers depend. 

The acronym SMART has been around for decades, helping people to move from pie-in-the-sky goals to practical objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Using this mnemonic as a “hack” when setting goals and metrics can be quite helpful. However, the process of defining and deploying goals includes much more than simply being SMART.

Once you have your operational excellence vision and strategy in place, resource needs identified, and practitioners hired, it’s time to plan and deliver OpEx education for the overall workforce. While you’ll find dozens of choices for OpEx concepts and tools that may be of use over time as you choose methods for OpEx deployment, it is often best to start with the basics of Lean: 

The world of business is changing. With a greater focus on how we can take things to the next level, those that make improvement an everyday practice will continue to have a leading advantage. But how can you differentiate your business from all those who are striving toward similar goals?

When we talk about “scope” in operational excellence, the important concept applies at two levels. One use of scope occurs at a project level, where scope is an essential part of the project charter, and helps to keep the project on task and in control for budget and timing until its completion.

Today’s topic, however, is about a higher-level scope, aligning with the entire OpEx vision and strategy. We can break this into several dimensions dealing with “where” and “when.”

Early data says “not really,” and that’s a problem.

My father, now retired, put food on the table for most of my childhood by running a small carpet cleaning and disaster restoration company.  As a child when on summer break from school I would go with Dad every day to his office to “hang out” while he arranged the daily work schedule, assigned jobs to the crews, inventoried supplies, paid bills, and performed all of his other standard work in order for the business to function.

Hurry up and wait a sec

“Hey, can you go implement sustainable improvement real quick?”

The pressure is immediately there to hurry up and get started without really thinking through resources.  At most companies, people in roles just like yours struggle with supporting, leading or adding value to teams intended to sustain improvement through Operational Excellence (OpEx).