No doubt you have heard of Operational Excellence. It is a managerial buzzword just like ‘agile’, but Operational Excellence is also something every company should strive to achieve. Running operations as effective as possible will help the company not only to make more money, but also to keep employees happy. When less things go wrong, less people will complain.
But what is operational excellence? Well according to Wikipedia, Operational Excellence means:
“The execution of the business strategy more consistently and reliably than the competition.”
This sounds nice in theory, but how do we accomplish this in practice? Hardly any companies have the same strategy so comparing companies is pretty hard, except of course when we look at financial figures. That is why it is very important to have your own benchmark to work with.
The Fundament
An integrated management system is the backbone of Operational Excellence. The IMS will consist of the internal process and the forms that are used for the required checks and balances. With modern online SaaS solutions the IMS can be managed with the highest efficiency.
These platforms will be your backbone that holds all your information together and allows you to distribute this information among your employees. There is no need to track and trace everything by hand. The backbone is critical for getting the right information and for creating that benchmark.
The Importance of Data
Data is a key ingredient in operational excellence. To benchmark your performance, data is required to do this. The data needs to be easily accessible and searchable to find the right information in your IMS.
Online platforms are the best modern technologies to not only have access to the data, but also to gather the information. However, in the end someone within the company needs to key in the data, as it won’t be created in the Cloud.
These modern platforms allow for secure access the data to anywhere in the world. At the same time their mobile apps allows for data creation at every location, production site or manufacturing plant. This way quality and safety related data can be harvested right at the time when something happens. The ability to create the report right away increases the number of reports significantly, which leads to more data overall to analyze.
Operational Excellence
When all the data has been gathered, it can be analyzed to see how efficient the company really runs. To reach Operational Excellence the company has to set internal goals to see how the efficiency can be improved. Trend analysis are crucial to track improvements over time.
Internal dashboards should be created to communicate the results with the company. The modern online platforms come with a built-in Dashboard manager to display the data the way you’d like. Displaying this data to every employee is crucial to create awareness and support by the employees, which will lead to better results.
