Operational excellence
Operational excellence is a way of running a company in which processes reliably deliver value to customers and keep improving, because the people involved understand, own and improve how the work is done. It combines process discipline, measurement and a culture of continuous improvement, and often draws on lean methods.
What is operational excellence?
It is not a single tool or project. In practice it shows up as clear ownership of processes, standard work where it helps, a few trusted measures, regular reviews, and problems solved at their cause rather than worked around. Process excellence is the same idea applied to one process at a time.
Automation can be part of it, but only for work that is stable and understood; automating an unclear process makes it fail faster.
Not to be confused with operations management software or cost cutting. Tools can support operational excellence, and costs often fall as a result, but neither is the goal itself.
Why it matters for SMEs
For example: a machine builder reviews one core process every month with its owner, keeps short tested instructions for the critical steps, and names a back-up for each. Improvement ideas now have a current picture to start from.
For SMEs, the first step towards operational excellence is often making the know-how visible at all. See what operations management means for an SME.
Operational excellence in the MentX approach
MentX captures how your company really works: the knowledge of your key people and the processes they run. We offer both a hands-on service approach — mapping your processes and capturing the knowledge behind them, from meetings, workshops and a guided intake — and our own personality-aware knowledge base, with full source attribution, in your own Knowledge Space. We build on the tools you already use and add best-practice solutions where they fit.
Operational excellence is step four of the approach: run and improve your processes on captured knowledge, with automation through established solutions. See operational excellence.