What is Operational Excellence?

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, system, 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 result 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.

The basic pursuit of Operational Resilience is to form, measure, sustain and improve a system involving human beings interacting with equipment in an environment that responds predictably and reliably to disturbances in order to achieve its designed function or objectives including efficiency, profitability, quality and safety.

Many large organizations see the value of pursuing Operational Resilience, but they often speak about it in terms of Operational Excellence. Take Chevron for example: their website contains an entire page dedicated to their philosophy on operational excellence.

For more resources, read our white paper about human error and the mindset shift needed to attain Operational Resilience.

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