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.

Your operational excellence team does not make widgets, so how do you create a budget? You can’t project X number of widgets produced at $Y per widget, an amazing improvement of Z% over last year, and A% better than your benchmarked projections for your primary competitor. But you need some way of creating a defensible budget or you’ll end up without resources.

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. 

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.

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.