A new year is fast approaching and it’s the perfect time to set ambitious goals for your business. If you’re planning on creating a culture of operational excellence in 2023 and beyond, this quick guide shares key insight and top recommendations from our Lean and visual management specialists.
Operational excellence is an ethos that originated in the 1980s and remains relevant to a wide range of sectors, particularly manufacturing sites and healthcare organisations. It revolves around the concept of achieving exceptional standards of efficiency, safety, product quality, output, sustainability and employee engagement, which together optimise all areas of business operations.
However, the key factor of operational excellence is that there is no definitive end goal. Instead, it involves the regular analysis of processes and identifying areas that can be further improved. As a result, operational excellence is a journey rather than a destination and requires a commitment from all levels of your organisational structure.
Operational excellence targets individual departments and especially singular processes as well as a company’s overall performance. Each of your teams can and should contribute to the pursuit of operational excellence by exploring opportunities for improvement and offering ideas wherever possible.
In order to put this sizeable task in action consistently, we recommend getting in touch with the team at Clarity about our Operational Excellence Academy. These unique and innovative courses are designed to train your managers and teams in the principles of operational excellence, which includes everything from identifying the 8 types of waste to better understanding 5S workplace organisation.
As well as being highly informative, both our Foundation and Advanced workshops are fun, engaging and guaranteed to equip your teams with the knowledge they require to implement the initial building blocks of OpEx before progressing to the next level.
To give you a clearer idea of how operational excellence can transform the way your business operates, here’s an example that we’re sure will inspire you:
Though we’re sure you’ll already be motivated by the idea of getting more done in less time, a company culture of operational excellence also covers many other areas of day-to-day operations. Here are a few examples:
As your dedicated Lean management specialists, we’re here to help you better understand and fully apply a variety of techniques and tools within each of your departments. There are numerous Lean principles and methods that facilitate operational excellence, with some of the most common being Lean leadership, Six Sigma and Kaizen Continuous Improvement.
As mentioned above, operational excellence aims to create long-term sustainable change through cultural shifts, which are embraced throughout the entire business. As a result, it’s the small, incremental improvements that are entirely unique to your business will be made on an ongoing basis.
Continuous improvement requires a particular mindset – one that values curiosity, perseverance, confidence, collaboration, creativity and innovation. The opposite of complacency, continuous improvement is the practice of realising that perfection is impossible but perpetual streamlining and enhancement will strengthen the business exponentially.
The alternative is when a company believes that it has reached perfection, at which point it will swiftly fall behind its competitors, market trends and consumer behaviours. This is why continuous improvement is as much about survival as it is about transformation.
Due to continuous improvement and operational excellence being all about nipping problems in the bud, removing constraints and bottlenecks, speeding up production, increasing efficiency and reducing waste, there’s a large volume of monitoring and measuring required. This may sound like too much to handle, so we’d like to reassure you that we have multiple visual management tools available that will make evaluation a simple and stress-free task.
From visual management boards and magnetic overlays to cleaning stations and shadow boards, Clarity can help you to pinpoint inefficiencies, solve challenges, measure results and ensure that your new systems can be sustained indefinitely. To get a better feel for what we can provide, take a look at our consultancy services and online shop.
We’re ready to help you plan for operational excellence in 2023 through meticulous site surveys, tailored consultancy, on-site training, bespoke visual management products and ongoing support. As well as improving your production rates and bottom line, this philosophy of continuous improvement will benefit employees at every level as well as suppliers, customers, stakeholders and anyone else who is either directly or indirectly involved in your business.
Like the idea of improving the way your business operates not just today but on a long-term basis? To get started, contact our team on +44 (0)1482 296451 or fill in our contact form to book your free initial consultation.
Get in touch and speak with a Visual Management Specialist to answer any questions you may have on our products, consultancy or business.
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