There are three essential ingredients of operational excellence:
- People have the right information, tools, materials and training to do their job successfully.
- Process performance is measured to provide usable and timely information to manage and improve the processes.
- Strategy is operationalised; goals are translated into practical action across all functions.
Getting this right is the role of the Operational Management System (OMS).
So, what can leaders do to optimise their operational management system?
Here are three key factors to consider:
- Building an effective OMS starts with design. This involves:
- Identifying the OMS owner
- Designing the operational processes as a coherent system end-to-end along the value stream
- Designing a set of measures that are integrated and aligned end-to-end
- Vertical alignment of management processes and measures
- Designing the management forums (including meeting structures and agendas)
- Ongoing management
- Overall organisational load (matching capacity with demand)
- Overall organisational planning and scheduling
- Resourcing
- Perpetual monitoring and management of end-to-end performance
- Engaging managers and ensuring cross-functional teamwork
- Compliance: ensuring operational processes comply with regulatory requirements
- Continuous improvement
- Oversight, coordination and monitoring of operational process improvement
- Implementation, oversight, coordination and monitoring of strategic improvement projects
- Continuous improvement of management processes
- Improvement of the improvement tools, training and processes
For a deeper dive, check out our guide to creating and optimising the operational management system, from our book Toward Excellence.
Questions to consider
- What would your business gain from optimising your OMS?
- What shortcomings in your OMS might be holding your business back?
Let’s get to work
Over 27 years of practice, we have developed a comprehensive, time-tested and field-proven business-improvement model and toolkit. We partner with ambitious businesses to identify strategic breakthrough opportunities in capability, performance and results, and we provide the tools, support, training and coaching to complement their existing expertise and help them achieve these.
If you’re aiming to build or optimise a business system using sound principles, values and standards to deliver consistently excellent and continuously improving results, we can help you develop and implement a strategy to accelerate progress and amplify the impact of your journey.
To get in touch, contact us here to book a free consultation.
Discover more of our tools and methodology in our book Toward Excellence.
