Operational Excellence in a multinational company

Good employee engagement but overall low maturity

The first part of the questionnaire, which is very simple with 18 questions, makes it possible to immediately position the level of maturity seen by all the top 30 managers.

The average maturity is just below 2, and has therefore not even entered the early stage of "Maturation". This is due in particular to three weak areas: processes, the improvement system and above all strategy.

Only employee engagement is at a relatively good level, close to "Performance". 

A company not ready to achieve its strategic vision

Regardless of the theme, it is clear that the management committee has an evaluation 10 and 30 points higher than that of the operational and functional departments.
This analysis came as a shock to the board: it meant that the company was not ready for the strategic plan they had defined. At their level, the operating methods are quite efficient, but although they sometimes feel it, the board members had no idea of such a big gap.
The detailed analyses, detailed below, then helped to better understand the reasons.

Inadequately deployed and agile strategy

Strategy is the theme with the lowest level of maturity. It was assessed on two aspects:

• Its declination, its deployment throughout the company
• Its agility, i.e. the company's ability to review and adapt the strategy according to changes in its environment.

We can clearly see that these two aspects are assessed as weak and need to be reworked.

Note: in the detail analysis, the discrepancies are less pronounced because a limited number of management committee members responded to this part.

Individual processes correct, but not very standard and flexible

Processes are the third weakest area.

The quantitative and qualitative analyses (participants' comments), show that some business processes are only "average". The main cause is that they are not standardised enough between different teams and sites (while remaining flexible!). This is difficult to do as they are also insufficiently formally defined. This limits the sharing of good practices, internal mobility and therefore the performance of each site.

Performance management is average, particularly because of ineffective dashboards

Performance management includes objectives and indicators (grouped into a dashboard), performance review and decision meetings and action plans. Overall, this is one of the better areas, but has one element that is very unsatisfactory: the dashboards, as the summary of the detail analysis shows.

Digging into this point we understand that the weak point is notably that it lacks unique and synthetic dashboards (for a given team), as illustrated here.

Where to start: what priorities?

The priorities seen by the participants served as a basis for discussion to build a coherent improvement project. 

Processes, roles and responsibilities, dashboards and strategy roll-out were among the pillars of the transformation. Ensuring that this was carried out within the support and operational entities, in particular to improve the ways in which they operate together.

Where to start: which organisational entities?

The analysis by entity shows significant differences in maturity, although all at a fairly low level. In particular, this allowed the selection of pilot entities to implement an improvement project.