Operational Excellence in a Multinational Corporation

Industry

Environmental Management

Localisation

US, Europe, Asia

Project type

Diagnosis of Operational Excellence with the 30 top managers

User

Corporate Director of Improvement

Context and objectives

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 offer more environmentally friendly products and services...

In order to achieve its strategic objectives, it is setting up a global Operational Excellence program. The first step is to assess its "Operational Excellence" maturity in order to define the main areas of progress.
To this end, it has called on Wevalgo to help it define and carry out a rapid assessment, with contributions from the company's 30 most senior executives from headquarters, business divisions and geographical organisations.

Main diagnosis results

Good employee engagement, but overall maturity is rather low

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

The average maturity is just under 2, and therefore has not even entered the early "Maturity" stage. This is mainly due to three weak areas: processes, the improvement system and above all strategy.

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

A company not ready to achieve its strategic vision

Regardless of the area, it is clear that the Executive Committee has an assessment that is 10 and 30 points higher than that of the operational and functional branches.
This analysis came as a shock to the board: it meant that the company was not ready to implement the strategic plan it had defined. At their level, the operating methods are quite efficient, but although they sometimes feel it, the board members had no idea that there was such a big gap.
The detailed analyses, detailed below, then allowed a better understanding of the reasons for this.

An insufficiently deployed and agile strategy

Strategy is the area with the lowest level of maturity. It was evaluated on two aspects:

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

It is clear that these two aspects are assessed as weak and need to be reworked.

Note: in the detailed analysis, the differences are less pronounced because a limited number of members of the Management Board responded to this part.

A poor performance improvement system in daily life and knowledge sharing

The improvement system is the second weakest area. The detailed assessment focused on two aspects on which there was general agreement:

A very operational aspect, cause analysis and problem solving.
A more transversal and cultural aspect: knowledge sharing and the culture of innovation

Fair, but not very standard and flexible individual processes

Processes are the third weakest area.

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

Average performance management, especially due to inefficient dashboards

Performance management includes objectives and indicators (grouped in dashboards), performance review and decision meetings and action plans. Overall, this is one of the best areas, but has one element that is very unsatisfactory: dashboards, as summarised in the detailed analysis.

By digging into this point, we understand that the weak point is notably that unique and synthetic dashboards are missing (for a given team), as illustrated here

Where to start: what are the 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 the implementation of the strategy were among the pillars of the transformation. Ensuring that this is carried out within the support and operational entities, in particular to improve the ways in which they operate with each other.

Where to start: which organisational entities?

The analysis by entity shows significant differences in maturity, although all at a fairly low level. This made it possible, in particular, to choose the pilot entities to implement an improvement project.

Wevalgo Services used

The evaluation 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 lighter 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 on the company's strengths and weaknesses, for all participants.
A selection of questions from our 100-question Operational Excellence questionnaire, plus company-specific questions for participants outside the Management Committee.

Who used Wevalgo's services: Corporate Director of Improvement

The Corporate Director of Improvement, reporting to the COO, conducted the diagnosis himself.

He only had to contextualise the questionnaire (introduction for participants, client logo, list of participants, etc.), send the link to the Wevalgo platform to the participants and see the results and analyses produced directly on the site.

Added value of Wevalgo services

First, since the company did not have a model to measure Operational Excellence, it should have either hired a consultant to build it or built it in-house. In both cases, this represents significant work of several days or even weeks, assuming that the right skills profile was found for the job.

Then, without the Wevalgo web platform, it would have had to "manually" administer the questionnaires, collect the responses, consolidate the results and carry out the relevant analyses with the associated graphs. This made it all the more difficult as the 30 participants are located in about ten different geographical sites spread over 3 continents.

With Wevalgo, all this was done in just a few clicks and a copy-paste of the analysis graphs directly accessible on our web platform. Quickly, easily and at a ridiculous cost compared to a solution with an external consultant.

This made it possible to quickly align the management committee and the 30 senior managers with the priorities and launch of a transformation project.