Operational Excellence in a multinational company

Sector
Environmental management
Location
US, Europe, Asia
Type of project
Operational Excellence Diagnosis of the 30 most senior managers
User
Director of Improvement
The company, a multinational in the environment-energy sector, has experienced strong growth in recent years. Nevertheless, it has become more complex and is facing a more complex environment with the need to provide more ecological offers.
In order to achieve its strategic objectives, it is implementing a global Operational Excellence programme. The first step is to assess its "Operational Excellence" maturity in order to define the main areas for progress.To do this, it called on Wevalgo to help it define and carry out a rapid assessment by involving the company's top 30 executives from headquarters, business divisions and geographic organisations.
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.
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.
The assessment included a combination of questionnaires from the Wevalgo catalogue with questions specific to the company context.
In addition, the client wanted the members of the management committee to answer only a light questionnaire while all others also had detailed questions.
We therefore constructed the questionnaire in several parts:
- The "Operational Excellence Maturity" questionnaire plus two open-ended questions about the company's strengths and weaknesses, for all participants
- A selection of questions from our questionnaire "Operational Excellence in 100 questions", plus company-specific questions, for participants outside the executive board.
The improvement manager, reporting to the General Manager, conducted the diagnostic himself.
He only had to contextualise the questionnaire (introduction for the participants, client logo, list of participants...), send the connection link to the Wevalgo platform to the participants and see the results and analyses directly produced on the site.
Firstly, as the company did not have a model to measure Operational Excellence, it would have had to either hire a consultant to build it for it or build it internally. In both cases, this represents a significant amount of work over several days to weeks, assuming they find the right skill set for the job.
Firstly, the company did not have a model to measure Operational Excellence, so they would have had to hire a consultant to build it for them or build it internally.
Then, without the Wevalgo web platform, she would have had to "manually" administer the questionnaires, collect the responses, consolidate the results and perform the relevant analyses with associated graphs. This was made all the more difficult as the 30 participants were located in a dozen different geographical sites spread over 3 continents.
With Wevalgo, all this was done with a few clicks and copy and paste of the analysis graphs directly accessible on our web platform. Quickly, easily, for a ridiculous cost compared to a solution with an external consultant.
This has allowed us to do a lot of work in a very short time.
This allowed us to quickly align the executive board, the 30 key managers on the priorities and the launch of a transformation project.
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