Operational Excellence becomes a way of life

When operational excellence has been the significant thread throughout your career, whether you’ve been on the shop floor delivering hands on improvements, or facilitating the development of a leadership team, it just starts to become the way you instinctively think. After all, what project does not benefit from being well defined up front with a strong understanding of the current state.

The transferable nature of operational excellence

After implementing projects on the shop floor and then leading operational continuous improvement strategy, I then spent 10 years working in Supply Chain management - supply planning, demand planning & purchasing. Here I could apply lean and even six sigma tools to optimise processes and solve complex problems.

It doesn’t stop there though (perhaps it is a sickness!) You start to see all of the processes that make up daily life (making a cup of tea, getting quickly changed at the pool or making a purchase) and suddenly you just can’t stop seeing opportunities for improvement & optimising your time to be more value added - I’m really hoping that this Operational Excellence sickness is not just me.

Sharing the OpEx Love

I love the moment when operational teams get it - you absolutely get to witness the lightbulb switching on. When I deliver my process mapping and opportunity spotting workshop, we start by covering the 8 wastes, so that teams know exactly what they are looking for. They can immediately think of numerous examples from their workplace - tools stored away from the machine, excess inventory and poor utilisation of their skills to mention just a few.

Process Mapping

We then introduce process mapping techniques. Spaghetti diagrams, swim lanes, value stream maps - different maps for different kinds of problems. Then teams get up and have a go at mapping one of their own processes. Once a process is mapped and agreed then they can start to look for areas of improvement - and mark these using kaizen bursts. Participants are always proud to return to the workplace with a list of measurable improvement they can work though. Most of these will make their life much easier AND bring value to the business via the reduction of waste in one of its forms.

A Passion for Operational Excellence

I’m genuinely passionate about operational excellence and making a positive difference. When you empower teams to make improvements for themselves you improve engagement and deliver sustainable change. To find out more about my training take a look here.