Operational Excellence Programme

What You Will Learn

Part 1. Strategy and Strategy Deployment

The journey to Operational Excellence starts with defining a clear plan or strategy for your business and being able to communicate this, in a meaningful way, to the internal and external stakeholders whose support and efforts will be needed to achieve it. You will;

• Identify and articulate your Business Purpose, Vision, Mission and Culture.
• Produce a strategy that supports your business goals and in a format that will allow you to communicate it effectively
• Have clear objectives for yourself and other stakeholders
• Understand how your strategy will increase stakeholder value
• Identify the value of partners and your supply chain
• Identify key support agendas such as Innovation or Carbon Reduction

Part 2. Performance Management

In business it is often said that ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. Key to the Operational Excellence journey is having in place the mechanisms and process to measure, monitor and review how the journey is going. In this section we will examine;

• The principles of a managed process
• Identifying and implementing the correct Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your business
• The use of Balanced Scorecards
• Establishment of measurable objectives with clear links to strategy
• Having a regular cycle of review meetings

Part 3. Process Excellence

If your ability to execute your business model consistently with the minimum of fuss or quality/service problems is an issue, then your process has either been outgrown by your business or wasn’t right in the first place. Business growth and an operating environment that is constantly changing means inefficiencies quickly creep into any organisation. Not only does this have a direct impact on profitability and reduce your actual value creation capacity, but it also effects your ability to service your customers correctly and remain competitive. In this part we will examine the tools and techniques that will allow you to understand and maximise both efficiency and effectiveness by;

• Mapping how your process creates value, correct deviance and eliminate unnecessary activities
• Understand LEAN thinking and how to use a range of simple tools to identify and eliminate the ‘7 wastes’.
• Use the principles of Six Sigma to stabilise your service and quality performance and ultimately deliver a correct product at the right time and cost every time.
• Question why any activity that your customers, given the choice, wouldn’t pay for, is being done at all.
• Introduce team-based problem solving to create a learning organisation
• Learn how to communicate performance

Part 4. Creating High Performance Work Teams

The realisation of Operational Excellence depends on everyone in the organisation being able to contribute at the levels required. The business author, Jim Collins, wrote about the need to have ‘the right people on the bus all sitting in the right seats’, but the organisation needs to be able to support them and be clear about what action is required. In this part of the programme we will

• Make sure the organisation structure supports the strategy
• Examine the leadership style and make sure it is aligned with the business needs
• Understand that being a Leader is not the same as being a Manager your role changes when you have high performance work teams
• Ensure the workforce has the right skills and competencies
• Assess the culture we have against the culture we want
• Identify the elements needed to help High Performing Teams work
• Developing a recruitment strategy