What Does an ‘Excellent’ Operation Look Like?

In most industries, operations play a critical role in achieving consistent growth targets. However, operations often do not receive the attention they deserve, resulting in stagnation or regression when businesses aim for higher growth. As companies strive to elevate their performance, they frequently encounter amplified past pain points and persistent bottlenecks. This scenario leads to frustration and impedes progress.

Why Focus on Operational Excellence?

Operational excellence involves optimizing how businesses produce and deliver their products and services. It encompasses streamlining processes, reducing waste, enhancing quality, and ultimately increasing profitability. For businesses, this means:

• Cost Savings: Efficient operations reduce unnecessary expenses, allowing businesses to invest more in growth and innovation.
• Maximizing Revenue: Building and enhancing your prospectus experiences opens opportunities to improve top-line growth, making new or existing sales within reach.
• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Streamlined processes lead to faster delivery times, higher quality products, and improved customer service, enhancing overall satisfaction and loyalty.
• Adaptability and Resilience: Well-structured operations can adapt quickly to market changes and disruptions, ensuring businesses can thrive in any economic climate.

Growth and change are inherently challenging. They require discipline and often a dose of humility. So, where should businesses start in their quest for improvement? Begin with an internal assessment of your operations.

Your Assessment: Core Concepts of Operational Excellence

I have distilled operational excellence into core concepts and an operations checklist to help you start your assessment:

• Repeatability: The ability to complete output in sequence or process consistently with the same team or components.
• Reproducibility: The ability to complete output using the same process but with a different team or components.
• Adaptability: The willingness and capability of operations to change.
• Measurability: The ability to measure outcomes. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

If an operation can consistently meet these concepts, it will be ready for significant growth. Using this as a rough assessment scorecard, where do you score?

The Reality

Most businesses will not meet all these criteria initially, and you are not alone in this. Achieving operational excellence is a journey that requires continuous improvement.

The Solution: Vision + Goals + Execution

We build, experiment, train, and evolve with technology because we aim to bring our customers more value efficiently. We strive to create, solve, and revamp our biggest opportunities to achieve operational excellence. However, predicting the unpredictable is often challenging. In some cases, businesses lack the right elements (people, process, technology).

Operational improvement and problem-solving involve a collaborative approach that requires patience for sustainable business returns. Dissecting your people, processes, and technology at the core of your major business processes is a recommended start. Enable your team to view operations through the lens of the assessment. From there, set your targets and goals that allow teams to address the opportunities within your reach. Attacking clear needs as a team and solving for quicker wins sets your team on a path of improvement.

Ultimately, there will be a need to create and share an operations vision as the company begins to execute. This two-pronged approach brings leadership and employees together in a continuous feedback loop.

Conclusion

Use this article as a guidepost in your everyday business and work. Work through the assessment and identify areas where you could use extra support. The Middlesworth Group specializes in helping companies in various industries take the next step and achieve their goals. We provide a return on investment for clients through operations improvement, focusing on people, process, and technology optimizations. We target areas with the largest net margin impacts while maintaining a laser focus on the customer experience. Our collaborative approach ensures client satisfaction as we develop and execute solutions to address technology gaps, organizational structures, operations planning, growth models, business analytics, process designs, and team performance.

For more information, visit themiddlesworthgroup.com.

Warm regards,

Ryan Middlesworth

The Middlesworth Group