Practical 100 criteria Operational Excellence model

What is Operational Excellence?

Operations must also be positioned in a way that provides actionable, insightful information that itself feeds directly back into the strategy definition itself. They're both sides of the same coin, but they feed off and empower one another in a way that allows them to become something far more powerful than either could be on its own. That's why, unlike most definitions of Operational Excellence that focus exclusively on the "execution" of the business strategy, we also include elements like its definition and improvement as well.

Why is Operational Excellence important?

We believe that this is absolutely critical as a staggering 67% of well-formulated strategies still fail due to poor execution, this according to a study published in 2017 in the Harvard Business Review.

A Practical Model to begin your improvement roadmap

After a great deal of time and consideration, we have developed our own Operational Excellence model to be used as a framework to build a performance improvement roadmap within your organisation - as well as ways to check the progress moving forward. Our model is practical, with 100 unique Operational Excellence criteria that are designed to enable any manager to self assess his own organisation maturity level before deciding for consulting support.

These criteria are based on not only years of observing all best practices but have been defined and implemented through management consulting experience with countless organisations and managers over the same period of time. All of these factors apply across each industry and regardless of company size.

At this point, however, there are a few important things to keep in mind. Specific industry criteria are not included in the model and would be evaluated through custom analysis. Likewise, the initial number of criteria we have collected and experienced - all of which was based purely on best practices - totalled very close to 100. As a result, we added a few more to reach that 100 number to make it easier for more people to perform the self assessment they need at this most pivotal of moments.

A Human Model before all else

We believe that Operational Excellence is nothing if not human. It should not be focused on processes, organisation or performance indicators, even if each of these elements is important.

An organisation can have the best processes and systems in place but it will all be almost useless if the 'organism' is not alive. If everything is not connected and not actually used by the humans in the organisation, Operational Excellence is not just difficult; it is impossible.

For this reason, we like to think of Operational Excellence as a human body: the strategy is its eyes, indicating where to go. The people and the Leadership of the company are the heart, giving energy to the whole body. The management system is the brain and nervous system, making decisions and transmitting information.

The organisation itself is the skeleton, providing a solid and coherent structure; the processes and methods are the arms, doing the necessary work. Finally, improvement and innovation are the legs, enabling progress and advancement.