Operational Excellence

What is it? Do you define success and value from your customers’ point of view? Do you listen to the voice of the customer for feedback? Are you focused on removing bottlenecks, reducing work-in-progress (WIP) and eliminating downtime? If so, you are well on the path toward achieving operational excellence.

In the simplest definition, operational excellence is the endless pursuit of improving your business’ “operations”. Its goal is to ensure that the operations create and deliver products and services customers want in order to enable business growth.

Operational excellence is nothing new. When Metagyre works with you to improve your operational systems, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Individuals such as Shigeo Shingo, Edward W. Deming and Eliyahu Goldratt. Their ground breaking ideas led to the models, tools and techniques we use today in pursuit of operational excellence, including:

These days, your journey along the operational excellence path can also include the new bread of SaaS based workflow tools to provide even more transparency into your business operations, if you know how to use them. Our experience with the Smartsheet platform makes it easy for you to plan, capture, manage, and report on work across your organization. We’ll help your team be more effective and get more done with less. We’ll show you how to report on key metrics and provide you with visibility into your business as the operational work happens with real-time dashboards, roll-up reports, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

What is achievable? The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards recognize companies whose case studies demonstrate outstanding operational excellence results. Recent winners include:

  • Sanofi Pasteur: The vaccine manufacturer was suffering from a culture of weak manufacturing quality. Operational excellence principles, allowed for a complete turnaround in two years, achieving increased supply, restoring trust of the health authorities, and more than a quarter of a billion dollars in savings.
  • Philips Lighting: Experiencing market share loss and revenue declines, along with low customer ratings, unreliable service, and lengthy product lead times. The company was looking to change and launched an operational excellence team using several tools, including Lean and Six Sigma, to deploy improvements based on the voice of the customer. The results included an increase in revenue of $125 million, sales growth of 20 percent sales in covered products, a sharp improvement in service reliability and a reduction in lead times. 
  • Black & Veatch: A global engineering firm headquartered in Kansas launched its operational excellence program with the specific goal of strengthen its energy business. The program yielded new business in power and oil and gas. The effort also delivered improved employee retention, higher productivity, and cost savings.

What’s next? Are these the results you should expect? Is there anything holding you back? When you have clarity into the work your team is getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish and where your business can grow.

Is it be a bad idea to schedule your free consultation with one of our operational excellence project leaders?

Metagyre is a Smartsheet Gold Partner providing professional consulting services and software licensing for companies deploying Smartsheet. Our project management expertise and IT workflow experience ensure your Smartsheet deployment will result in the process improvements you are looking for.