Five Actionable Steps to Boost Operational Excellence in Any Business

Achieving Operational Excellence is a multifaceted endeavor, but the key lies in understanding your business goals and bridging the gap between your current state and your desired future state.

Recently, I shared my thoughts on tried and tested methodologies to improve operational performance at the CAMSCAT OpEx & Digital Day with an audience of 120 attendees.

Dr. Joseph M. Juran coined the term Operational Excellence in the 1970s, and he worked with Japanese business leaders to improve quality. Over time, companies worldwide have adopted this approach. Operational Excellence employs a systematic approach to achieve lean operations. It goes beyond process management, focusing on behavioral changes to increase operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

What is Operational Excellence?

Operational Excellence is the synergy of strategy, data, people, process, culture, and compliance that enables businesses to reduce friction and fine-tune business processes across functional teams. To understand it in practice, let’s define operations within a company.

Operations are tasks that make the best use of the resources within a company to achieve sustainable growth. These tasks refer to any activities that keep the business running.

Some examples of key tasks include:

  1. IT support and security compliance.
  2. HR hiring, onboarding, payroll, and benefits.
  3. Legal compliance and risk management.
  4. Customer service responding to users’ requests and managing escalations.
  5. Financial review of the company’s revenue health, risk, and operations expenses.
  6. Marketing process on the web, social media, public relations, events, and qualifying marketing leads
  7. Sales process in qualifying customer pipeline, creating proof of concepts, and managing customer support.

The journey to Operational Excellence begins with placing customers at the center of all operations. Understanding customer needs, preferences, and expectations is pivotal in aligning your efforts to deliver exceptional value and experiences. It involves continuous learning from customer and employee feedback, understanding industry experts and market trends, and embracing a growth mindset to drive innovation.

Five Actionable Steps to Improve Operational Excellence

1. Enhanced Efficiency: Identify inefficiencies and gaps, socialize risks and ideas to strengthen processes, reduce waste, and improve productivity. This enables you to do more with the same resources, ultimately boosting profitability.

2. Improved Quality: Stay informed about industry trends and identifying new ways to delight customers by ‘decoupling’ each stage of the operations workflow. This allows you to precisely pinpoint how each stage can be solved digitally, leading to increased customer satisfaction.

3. Agility and Responsiveness: Foster a culture of agility to respond quickly to market changes and customer demands. This adaptability is vital in today’s fast-paced business environment.

4. Risk Management: By establishing clear processes and standards, Operational Excellence helps identify potential risks early, allowing for proactive management and mitigation.

5. Cost Reduction: Define ‘must-have’ and ‘nice-to-have’ activities, find their dependencies, and consider new ways to co-share resources. Co-sharing resources help team members explore efficiencies without compromising on operations excellence.

These steps improve operational performance and have the added bonus of contributing to a positive organizational culture.  

Proven Success: Using Operational Excellence to Achieve Execution Efficiency

One of our global teams successfully managed a complex set of processes supporting a customer service engagement program for a high-tech client operating across multiple geographies. After assessing execution times, quality assurance, and delivery, the team identified areas for improvement. We conducted detailed process mapping to address these challenges and analyzed each step to evaluate its value and relevance.

Using the Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) methodology, we broke down processes to assess the frequency, criticality, and requirements to complete each step. This analysis led us to create an improvement project, resulting in a 40% increase in execution efficiency and achieving 100% Quality Assurance metrics across all regions. To validate these improvements, we organized a Kaizen event, bringing together experts to fine-tune the process.

Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning “improvement” or “change for the better.” It refers to a philosophy or practice that focuses on continuous improvement in all aspects of life –  including business processes. A Kaizen event involves all employees involved in that operation and aims to eliminate waste and inefficiencies through analysis, collaboration, and open dialogue. The event focused on reengineering workflows to enhance knowledge-sharing and validate outcomes through thorough testing. Kaizen and FMEA, are traditional Operational Excellence tools, that continue to drive impactful results even in today’s digital world.

Artificial Intelligence and Operational Excellence

Core Operational Excellence practices bring a tangible framework for emerging technologies to accelerate their value. Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables you to think about what’s next and brainstorm what’s possible, to turn challenges into business opportunities. Combining AI with Operational Excellence bring new ways of exploring how we achieve efficiency and drive effective execution.

We view Operational Excellence as a catalyst for innovation. We combine our knowledge in Operational Excellence around Lean Management, Six Sigma, Failure Mode Effects Analysis, Kaizen, and AI to co-create a solution that best meets your business goals. It’s about driving meaningful change to meet your business outcomes according to your timeline.

Antonio Briceño, Beyondsoft Costa Rica Country Manager

Next Steps

If you are looking for ways to gain operational efficiency without compromising growth and innovation and would like to explore AI to strengthen your business strategy, we can help. Together we will translate concepts into tangible applications and develop a strategy to secure leadership support. Reach out to us today.