Not spending $1000 on a $100 problem, paying invoices on time, delivering products at the deadline, keeping project costs on budget, coming to work on time, not calling in sick, are not examples of Operational Excellence. These are just examples of your job and what you’re expected of any given day.
Sometimes, we need to stop and remind ourselves that what when perform our usual tasks well, and sometimes better than well, that doesn\’t necessarily indicate a display of operational excellence. Operational excellence is about outdoing, outperforming, an outright out-resulting consistently all the time.
- Delivering an important feature or product ahead of schedule – by several weeks
- Paying supplier invoices before Net 30 terms or before negotiated and agreed upon terms
- Identifying ALL bugs in a product before releasing it – no bugs would be reported by our customers once in their hands – just new feature requests
- Zero product returns due to defects
- Zero complaints from our customers
- Upstream customer feedback flow right to the top of the process
- Including our customers in our processes
- Using common tools and repositories to store and collaborate on documents or
- What examples can you come up with?
Some of you may have worked elsewhere before arriving at the company where an established quality management system existed such as ISO 9001, or Six Sigma. Some of your experience may be that it was cumbersome and bureaucratic, or that it didn’t deliver the promised results of working for a better company and pleasing customers by delivering superior products or services.
After many employee interviews at the company about your current and past experiences we’ve observed that many of these complaints are the result of a quality management system that was not flexible, and that had not listened to the customer: You.
Operational Excellence Examples in Action
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