Cover Story: The road to achieving operational excellence
Operational excellence (OpEx) is an approach to business management which emphasises continuous improvement across all aspects of a business, within all its processes, by creating a culture where management and employees are invested in business outcomes and empowered to implement change. It allows organisations to reach higher levels of service and product delivery through better processes and standards – ultimately leading to competitive advantage and greater market share in any given industry.
For some, OpEx can be a nebulous term, but for John Palfreyman, an associate professor at Leeds University Business School, it encapsulates a “never-ending journey of business operations improvement to deliver the organisation’s strategic intent”.
According to Pauline Found, a lecturer in operations management at Cardiff Business School, while operational management is relatively well understood as managing an existing system efficiently, OpEx, in contrast, focuses on continuously improving those processes, systems and workflows to achieve the highest levels of efficiency, quality and, importantly, effectiveness within an organisation.
“It aims to optimise operations, eliminate waste, and deliver consistent value to customers and stakeholders, and involves a combination of strategies, methodologies and cultural aspects that contribute to sustained performance improvement,” she explains. “All of the improvement methodologies fall under the umbrella of OpEx, and it is about selecting the right improvement methodologies to solve the problem they are addressing.
“Ultimately, OpEx is about creating a culture of continuous improvement that becomes ingrained in an organisation’s DNA. It is a holistic approach that requires alignment across all levels of the organisation and a shared dedication to delivering the best possible outcomes for customers, employees and stakeholders,” she adds.
In the opinion of Joseph F. Paris Jr., founder of the Operational Excellence Society, OpEx is a state of readiness attained when the efforts throughout an organisation align on achieving its strategies. It is where the corporate culture is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there. Ultimately, OpEx is a precursor to becoming a high-performance organisation. “It is a company that is operating as a company – as a single operational entity that is executing in accordance with its plan and knows that its people are its most important assets,” he adds.
