Our vision
A roadmap towards excellence and innovation, in four principles.
01
Focus on customer added value
The customer is king. Everyone agrees — and almost nobody acts on it.
No one would dispute that the customer comes first. Looking at ourselves from the customer’s perspective, however, remains genuinely difficult. What we believe is our value contribution can be quite different from what the customer expects. The way we measure ourselves — service performance, for instance — can be quite different from the way the customer measures us.
Actively listening to the customer is a powerful innovation driver: it forces everyone to question bureaucracy, it uncovers new business opportunities, and it provides an external push for change. Customer-focused organisations are consistently more innovative.
02
Eliminate waste and variability
Any use of resources that does not create value for the end customer is waste. Any action the customer is not willing to pay for is non-value-added.
Ask yourself an uncomfortable question: how much of your time is spent genuinely adding value to your company’s customers — value they would willingly pay for? In most organisations there is a tremendous opportunity to reduce complexity, eliminate waste and free up time and capacity.
Process variability and instability are a major source of waste. They generate customer dissatisfaction and inconsistent quality. They create rework and other non-quality costs. And they force “buffers” — extra capacity, extra inventory — that exist purely to protect us from ourselves.
Fighting variability, making operations more predictable, stable and standard, is a cornerstone of Operational Excellence.
03
Increase value stream speed and flexibility
It is better to have good processes and average people than good people and average processes.
Cost efficiency, quality and service excellence come through efficient, consistent and properly managed processes. Operational excellence is about taking the waste out of them — making them leaner, more flexible and more responsive to customers and the market.
Make sure stakeholders across the organisation can see, manage and improve the processes they are part of. Drive a value stream perspective that crosses functional boundaries, from suppliers all the way to customers.
04
Drive cultural change
100% of successful change initiatives had a good technical solution. So did 98% of the unsuccessful ones.
R = Q × A
Operational Excellence is, above all, a workplace transformation initiative — one that touches virtually every employee. Its success (R, for Results) is a product of two factors: how good and compelling the principles, methodology and tools are (Q, for Quality), and how well the organisation accepts them and how effectively you drive change (A, for Acceptance).
Transformation initiatives typically fail not because of Q, but because of A. Most of us are comfortable with Q — we have the tools and skills to design good solutions on paper. Changing attitudes, mindsets and behaviours is much harder. So think not only about the tools and systems you are going to introduce, but about how you are going to engage employees and drive the change itself.
Principles are cheap. These are what they produced.
Four principles are easy to write on a page. What matters is what happens when an organisation actually runs on them — so here are the numbers from engagements that did.
Can we help you improve your operations?
Tell us where it hurts. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.