Achieving Service Operational Excellence

Achieving Service Operational Excellence is simple but not simplistic. Any organisation that genuinely wants to, can do so within a timeframe of 3-5 years, with very significant localised improvements being achieved within 6 months.

For many organisations a timescale of 3-5 years or more seems way too long and much effort is often put into short term initiatives, Inevitably many of these short term initiatives deliver only short term improvements.

Unfortunately the long term negative consequences of these short term initiatives take time to come home to roost, with the link between cause and effect not always connected in space and time.

The following 10 steps, if followed with a passion, have proven themselves to deliver world class performance in both the short and long term because they build incrementally upon each other resulting in a sustained incremental improvements in the operational competence of the organisation over time.

The Ten Steps are:

1. Up-skill the front line teams and managers in the Fundamentals of Operations Management.
2. Up-skill the middle management in Lean Six Sigma (LSS) thinking and skills.
3. Establish an Operations Management Dashboard that monitors daily performance against plan.
4. Select key members of the front line organisation to be trained as Green & Black Belt LSS practitioners.
5. Create virtual end to end process teams to target end to end process improvements.
6. Appoint Value Stream Owners to formalize end to end process ownership.
7. Measure the operational performance of the business in terms of end to end process metrics with a particular emphases on process cycle time
8. Establish clear measurements for the Voice of the Customer and measure all performance in terms of meeting and exceeding their needs and expectations.
9. Use Value Engineering techniques to engineer cost out of the business
10. Develop a “Systems Thinking” competence in the business to drive unnecessary complexity out of the business.

We (http://www.mclaw.ie/) know from experience that these principles work when applied with a passion for excellence.

Nothing in these 10 steps is beyond the capability of the average service worker, knowledge worker or service industry manager.