OpEx's Best Is Yet To Come

Revolutionary Innovation will Unleash OpEx's Full Potential

Technology such as the smart phone loaded with apps such as Netflix and Spotify continue to prove to people of all ages that our days clicking on keypads and using other out-of-fashion hardware-heavy devices are quickly coming to an end. Keeping this in mind it's hard to ignore that digital transformation in business operations however is much less fluid, much less immediate and in many cases anything but 'digital'.

Having recently visited a manufacturing plant where shop floor issues are captured on a paper ticket with a pencil and placed physically into a plastic tray for delivery to the line managers, it is no exaggeration to state that business operations are still years behind the trends of individual consumers whose demand for digital automation continues to grow exponentially.

Prior to launching our continuous improvement software-as-a-service offering in 2016, my fellow co-founders and I made some big assumptions which over the course of time working with our clients have proven to be less-than-accurate forcing us to pivot, enhance, test, and retest our product as well as our go-to-market approach.

One of the most interesting discoveries was our false assumption that companies were already adequate in using technology to capture, communicate and retain the know-how of their staff. For most companies, knowledge retention and the leveraging of it for innovative purposes is a real issue, one reason being the great disconnect between HR, L&D and Business Operations.

While operational excellence is based on standardisation and reduction of deviation, the art to giving your company a competitive advantage lies in harnessing the know-how of operational leaders to make quick, on-the-spot tactical decisions that support the company's long term, breakthrough strategy. A task that is very difficult, if not impossible to completely digitise.

Digital Transformation in Operational Excellence is about the Staff

Although digitisation includes the likes of visual dashboards and electronic KPI devices visible to all and in real time, let it be clear that we by no means are promoting the removal of manual white boards, or the reduction of huddle sessions and the good old fashion 'go to the Gemba' events to see how things are first hand.

Business leaders know that operational excellence will never be fully automated. They know that operational excellence is about leadership and the agility in tactical decision making which often requires instinct.

That said however, they also know that the field of operational excellence and continuous improvement is lagging behind in the digital transformation revolution and far from its full potential.

For this we have put together the following short list of tell-tale signs that your company's operational excellence program is still in the digital stone age.

When assessing the effectiveness of your IT support program and more importantly the appetite of your management team to invest in it, we suggest you ask the following seven questions:

1. Does our C-Suite approach digital transformation from a cost-cutting perspective? Beyond quick fixes, your management team investing in technology should be ready to commit for the long haul. If the questions they are asking are not giving you this impression, there is a conflict of interest in what your shareholders want from digital transformation and what your management team is trying to gain in the short term.
2. Is our process portfolio centralised and available to who needs it when they need it? If getting a list of business processes for a team requires phone calls, e-mails and even worse, meetings, lets face it, you are still in the digital stone age.
3. Do we have an easy-to-use dashboard showing our portfolio of PDCA improvement projects? If not, chances are you are paying a group of consultants an exuberant amount of money to maintain an excessive amount of offline spreadsheets.
4. Do we have visible, visual cues on the work floor highlighting waste reduction opportunities? A key element giving the message to staff that management supports a continuous improvement culture focused on the constant elimination of process waste.
5. Does Human Resources have access to the key talent differentiators required for process competency growth? In other words, is there material available when architecting company roles, responsibilities and job descriptions that allows those responsible for the retention of staff and know-how to make quick and intelligent decisions when recruiting?
6. Can IT quickly align the short list of bug fixes and product enhancement requests to the business processes they support? A key element to ensure business operations and IT are not working in siloes.
7. Does your KPI reporting strategy nurture collaboration or confusion? If your KPIs are being managed in a spreadsheet, then you are paying dearly for the excessive amount of friction required to keep those spreadsheets updated and disseminated in the right moments. By using such an offline system, you are compromising the level of quality when engaging decision makers to review under performance and take corrective action.

For each item listed above lies our experiences lived and observations made time and time again in the field.

Such episodes have inspired us over the years to rigorously push our agenda in closing the IT functional gaps that continue to limit companies from maximising their true digital potential thus making them less competitive.

In layman's terms, we invite companies of the future to be aware that if core operational information about processes and the people responsible to carry out those processes is still not available on-demand and in a way that does not disturb your process experts when obtaining it, then it is time to revisit the way you do things and the leadership qualities of your management team.

The future of the Operational Excellence will be controlled by those who take the initiative to leverage existing technology while articulating process know-how accrued in the field. By forging partnership with technical experts and software architects, technical bottlenecks that naysayers use as excuses to remain complacent in their comfort zone will be made visible and eliminated with greater speed and success making your company more change-focused and competitive in the long term.

Digital transformation and continuous improvement is an ongoing journey driven by company leaders and supported by all and the time to start is now.

Day one or one day. What kind of transformation leader are you?

If you liked this article, you will like this 13-step tool kit assisting growth-focused companies on leveraging know-how to successfully launch & sustain their innovation program

About the Author

Andrew Lenti ?has been working with multinational organisations involved in business transformation initiatives since 1999. In that time he has been based in 6 different European countries as well as the United States. He has rich experiences working with business leaders at all levels of the organisational hierarchy and has spent vast amounts of time working with shared services and outsourcing centres of excellences on lean management and business restructuring implementation projects. He is one of the co-founders of?TOPP Tactical Intelligence Ltd , a European operational excellence software provider and is one of the original architects of?PRESTO P-D-C-A , the all-in-one continuous improvement business management system for growth-oriented companies and consulting firms looking to put work, strategy deployment and process improvement on autopilot.

To learn more about PRESTO P-D-C-A, read case studies and client testimonials, visit?www.toppti.com ?or contact Andrew directly on?LinkedIn .