Operational Excellence | Fit First Fractional

What is Operational Excellence?

In a nutshell, Operational Excellence (OE) is the "backbone of profitability and growth sustainability". OE is the needed commitment to embrace principles, tools, and foundations that create a culture of excellence within an organization. OE means that every employee in their respective roles can understand, deliver, and continuously improve the flow of value to a customer. OE is responsible for effective management of resources such as materials, machines, technology, and people. It is imperative that these resources are managed from start to finish with an OE mindset through and accompanying lens of HR expertise for an organization to be competitive.

What are the foundations of Operational Excellence?

Planning: Managers must constantly forecast, plan, and execute while being able to pivot based on changing conditions.
Process: Having repeatable tasks within a sequence is imperative to producing high-quality of goods and services.
Waste Management: Managers must understand the difference between "necessary waste" and "unnecessary waste" in processes and how to mitigate and eliminate each respectively.
Efficiency & Effectiveness: Managers must understand the difference between "efficient" & "effective" operations to correctly troubleshoot bottlenecks, inadequate resources, and fix down times to create optimal process performance.
Silent Running: Having processes and procedures that operate automatically creates a baseline of "silent running" which makes deviations from processes/procedures easily identifiable and quickly fixable.
Cost Control: While operations as a function/department typically does not increase revenue, it is integral to meeting profitability goals by effectively managing the operational cost structure.
Quality Control: On-time and on-spec as requested not only delivers customer satisfaction in the short-term, but is necessary for new business development, customer retention, and most importantly company reputation.
Continuous Improvement (CI): Complacency leads to stagnation and a lack of innovation. Competitive advantage is dependent on a fierce commitment to using CI tools with a management mindset that is relentless in searching for better ways to do things.
Complimentary Technology: Technology must effectively support these foundations after the desired outcomes of each foundation are understood. Technology as a complimentary tool avoids mistakenly deploying it as a silver-bullet solution.