Operational Excellence

Business processes inherently carry with them inefficiency and they force people to behave in specific ways. If these processes are complex and broken then even the performance of the best people will be inhibited. Effective business process improvement can help in several key areas:

• Unifying purpose, strategy and behaviours. Operational efficiency always suffers when a business’ strategy and culture are misaligned. This causes unnecessary work, inhibits communication and leads to functional ‘silos’. By deploying an Operational Excellence approach we can make real changes to work culture and operating practices aligning them with strategy.
• Aligning frontline work with business objectives. It’s common to see a strong agreement on strategy at the board level, which then gets lost or diluted as it filters down through the organisation. This can become especially evident at the level of customer interface. More often than not, this is due to people at the operational frontline carrying out tasks that seem important but which aren’t aligned with the strategy. At times the challenge is at the senior and mid-level management, where priorities aren’t effectively communicated to the workforce. Operational Excellence quickly shines a light on the business ‘pain points’, no matter if they occur at the very top or at the frontline of the organisation.

• Improving the effectiveness of decision making. It can be tempting to think that an organisation’s problems can be solved by investing heavily in technology. While this can sometimes be the case, especially in sectors such as manufacturing, it is far more effective to look for non-technical solutions first. If people aren’t working efficiently, or processes are not fit for purpose, technology will rarely fix the issue. As part of your business process improvement we’ll help you see which parts of the business may benefit from a technology solution, and help you choose and implement the right one. If the issue is more fundamental then we’ll address that first, ensuring you don’t invest in technology where it’s not needed.
• Identifying the value of your customer set. Not all customers are created equal. Many businesses presume that all customers bring value and are worth serving with the same level of priority, but this can result in inflated business costs, spending time on customers that are costly to serve but offer little value to your business. By identifying which customers create good demand for your business, this will enable you to focus your efforts across your customer set to achieve maximum value. Along with a renewed focus, we will also help your business to improve how it operates to meet customer needs, as well as establishing how best to attract new customers.