Operations is an integral part of businesses and operational excellence leads to business excellence. It is designed to provide value to customers and stay relevant with customer needs in achieving customer satisfaction. Excelling in operations is an art to ensure the success of new business models being innovated and and deliver substantial stakeholder value quarter on quarter in addition to expanding revenues on ongoing basis. Fundamentally the following are pillars of operational excellence.

1. Product Design: Businesses have to design and develop products that are industry renowned and recognized by analyst communities to echo the sentiments. Managing delivery of minimum viable products designed is the default expectation. The underlying business finances create and reinforce the strong backbone for success.
2. Process Optimization: A simple measure of process efficacy is delivery excellence. Right from business alignment to managing right infrastructure to ensure the customer experience is mandatory in digitally reimagined world.
3. Support Efficiency: Customer focus and result certainty is the norm of business support. End user and customer always pose a healthy challenge and it should be primo motto of businesses across the world to reinforce the customer engagement and avoid customer dissatisfaction. The key to achieving this is building the right talent and demonstrate the workforce results.
4. Operational Effectiveness: The time tested leadership and governance is the foundational block of operational excellence. Among all the industry renowned practices workforce communication and engagement plays a key role here. Fiscal and regulatory compliance is at most important along with Deming & Japanese quality measures. Corporate social responsibility and ethics is defacto expectation of millennials to name a generation importance.
5. Art of Innovation: Innovation at least should demonstrate financial viability and sustenance of a business. If a business is not creating a constant value to society its very existence is questioned and rest is the story based on historical anecdotes. Innovation comes from promoting culture of joint investment from partners and create an ecosystem of co-innovation. Remember we are living in a world of crowdsourcing.
6. Security & Safety: It has maximum relevance in today’s connected world. Security comes from assurance – the level of guarantee that a system will behave as expected, countermeasure – way to stop a threat from triggering a risk event, risk threat avoidance, vulnerability management and exploiting vulnerability that has been triggered by a threat. Safety is important to distinguish between products that meet standards, that are safe, and those that merely feel safe.

I will be discussing further details around tenants of operational excellence in next post.

Recommended Reading

Operational Excellence Handbook: A Must Have for Those Embarking On a Journey of Transformation and Continuous Improvement

Operational Excellence Handbook is designed for leaders and practitioners wishing to transform their organizations through strategy and culture, and through the application of operational excellence approaches, methodologies, processes, and tools. The handbook contains 70 chapters organized in five sections describing strategy, culture, methodologies, project management, and tools that are helpful to create immediate and sustainable value for your organization. As you travel on your value generation journey, you will wish to select the appropriate approach, methodologies, and tools – based on your organization’s current situation, future strategies and goals, resource availability and limitations, as well as urgency and schedule needs – that will provide immediate value. With the purchase of this handbook, the reader has access to a file containing all templates referenced in the book.