What is operational excellence?
If it is to have any meaning or impact when applied to your organization, Operational Excellence should be properly defined.
Operations: any aspect of a business – be it the product or service being offered, the company culture, business processes, customer service, human resources, and beyond. In order to achieve operational excellence, all of these sectors need to be working in alignment.
Excellence: defined as the quality of being outstanding or extremely good.
At SHEA Global, we define Excellence with the three Es:
- Efficacy: Do you do what you say you will do?
- Effectiveness: Do you do it well?
- Efficiency: Do you deliver good value?
Our goal is to always work towards Excellence in our own internal operations and also help our customers achieve the same.
The most common misconception about striving for operational excellence that many businesses make is to try to approach it from a bottom-up approach, when it is more effective to look at it from a top-down viewpoint.
For instance, if a company is struggling to achieve excellence in the shipping department, they may look at that issue internally and think that it has to do with the business processes that are in place, the warehouse management software being used, the team members’ skills, and so on.
But in reality, this way of looking at the problem can be too narrow.
If the problem is with a business process, why is that business process in place? Is it even needed?
If the problem is with the software application being used, what was that application intended to achieve? Is the software being used to its most effective capability and does the team know how to use it properly?
If the problem is stemming from the employees, is it really a skills issue or does it have to do with inefficient processes, ineffective company culture, a lack of software onboarding… you get the idea.
It can be difficult to perform this type of assessment of your own business, which is where a consultant — like SHEA — comes in.
Our team is trained to view the organization as a whole. We know how to help you define operational excellence for you and work with your team to achieve it.
At SHEA Global, we always keep in mind the three Es: efficacy, effectiveness, and efficiency. We believe that every business can be excellent. Contact us today to help your team do business better.