Operational Excellence refers to the pursuit of industry-leading performance through consistent and reliable execution or said differently, operations done right the first time and every time.
Operational Excellence emphasizes the deployment of philosophies, protocols, systems, and tools towards continuous improvement measured against results or key performance indicators. It involves a philosophy in the workplace where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership results in ongoing improvement.
Our vision is that Operational Excellence is a term widely used across industries to describe various aspects of a fundamental quest for Operational Resilience.
The term Operational Resilience describes cohesion between processes aimed at business performance and improvement. Productivity, profitability, and safety are concurrently linked. And because these are lagging measures of output, aside from other variables such as costs and market dynamics, when operations are resilient the system is optimized for profitability and safety. Unfortunately, as many have learned, those indicators can often mislead the organization into failure. The model is to identify and assess leading indicators, which are found in the contributing operation.
Many large organizations see the value of pursuing Operational Resilience, but they often speak about it in terms of Operational Excellence.
Operational Resilience ultimately leads to Operational Excellence as it reduces direct and indirect costs and optimizes the system for profitable and safe performance. Results are not simply because of the absence of setbacks and incidents, but much more so the result of an energized and committed workforce.
Resilient operations create excellence further through enhanced quality, improved product conformance, and reduced prevention and failure costs thus generating an increased return on quality.
And finally, Operational Resilience promotes Operational Excellence by advancing your organization in its industry position through error reduction and continuous improvement. A culture of doing things right and managing costs and leadership that anticipates and plans for risk is created and maintained.
For more resources, read our white paper about human error and the mindset shift needed to attain Operational Resilience.