Improving Your Business Operational Excellence
Operational excellence can be defined in so many ways, but in this post, we will talk about the core importance of implementing it in your business.
Businesses today are challenged with rising competition and customer expectations. These factors are the key drivers of change in business processes to ensure that they are up to speed with present customer demands.
These challenges also push businesses to achieve operational excellence, a concept in the world of business where the aim is to provide outstanding customer service while running an efficient operation.
If you’re looking to improve your operational excellence, then read on.
What is Operational Excellence?
Operational excellence or OE is a business process that allows companies to execute their business operations in a way that ensures customer satisfaction and efficient delivery of products.
This helps organizations to achieve their goals in a systematic way by making sure that they have control over the processes and other operating activities involved.
Maximizing innovation and continuous improvement while reducing waste, lead times, inventory levels and other expenses affects your OE.
But, to achieve it you need to get everyone on board. This means that your employee experience and excellence will greatly affect your business’s performance So for you to achieve OE, strive to improve the culture within your organization.
When all is said and done, operational excellence comes when a business can meet their customer’s needs, while also meeting their own goals for efficiency and higher profit performance, plus making sure that employees are engaged.
4 Components of a Strong Operational Excellence
Strong OE is a key factor in the success of any business. It requires identifying and prioritizing the “low-hanging fruit” or those areas where we can make quick and significant gains that will have an immediate impact on business performance.
These four components should be present to ensure that you can achieve strong operational excellence:
1) Strategy: Identify potential threats and solutions and then brainstorm what needs to be accomplished and how to get there.
2) Process: Define the steps and policies that need to be implemented in order to make sure that all business stakeholders are on board with the strategy.
3) Employees: Ensure that all employees have the skills they need in order to reach their full potential. This also means that managers or some operational excellence managers need to be engaged and committed to the process of continuous improvement on an ongoing basis by following through on commitments and engaging in meaningful dialogue with their colleagues.
4) Technology: Look out for the latest technology that you can leverage at every level in order to improve workflow efficiency. Your business needs to be adaptable and there is no question that technology is going to be a big part of your success.
Benefits of Implementing Operational Excellence to Your Company
There is a growing need for organizations to focus on and identify the strategies and practices which will increase their operational excellence. The benefits include:
1. Helps you reduce costs.
2. Improves customer service.
3. Increases product quality and safety standards.
4. Boosts worker morale and productivity levels for an organization’s employees—leading to higher-quality work outputs.
5. Fosters a stronger reputation among consumers through enhanced transparency and trustworthiness of your business operations
Integrating OE to your business
Operational excellence is about making an organization robust and resilient to external changes by designing it with change in mind.
To make sure that the company is ready for any change, it’s important to be adaptable.
What’s the best way for your company to do that?
Some organizations reduce their overhead by finding ways to do more with less (i.e., lean manufacturing).
Others develop new technologies that will increase production without adding labor (i.e., robotics) or cut labor expenses by replacing human labor with machines (i.e., automation).
Hire the right people, keep them motivated, and give them the tools they need to ensure that everything will run smoothly.
Conclusion
To put it simply, operational excellence is the framework of continuously improving an organization’s effectiveness, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
This process is of course not a one-time event. It requires constant monitoring and evaluation of operations to identify areas that require improvement.
Operational excellence is crucial now more than ever. As more businesses continue to rise, the threats are becoming harder and harder to face. Achieving operational excellence will help you monitor the efficiency of your processes and take corrective actions on inefficient practices.
If you need help improving your operational excellence, schedule a call with us.
