It is about Operational Excellence

With the current economic strain companies have cut back on the essentials in order to survive.  In many cases training needs have been cut reduced , and managers are taking an alternative look at initiatives such as Lean and Six Sigma designed to drive improvement and yield significant results.

Achieving operational excellence is about being able to integrate the people, systems and actions to achieve desired performance.  With that said operational excellence means:

➡️Having a strategy that defines the overall direction 

➡️A performance management systems that provides a guide on internal performance

➡️Implementing initiatives such as Lean Six sigma to drive performance

➡️Creating a culture that is agile and can meet the changing needs of the organization

➡️Upgrading systems to sustain performance

These are very broad areas that often have consultants or specialists in each area.  The result is that most organizations use a piece meal approach to achieving their objectives which do not provide the means to sustain the improvement that they need..

Any initiative that is designed to achieve a certain level of performance must involve the use of a holistic approach and must be customized to meet the needs of each group.  Without which performance is not sustained.

An approach to achieving operational excellence can be found by integrating the concepts of Lean and Six Sigma.  The combined approach –Lean Six Sigma provides a wide range of tools that are able to ensure overall efficiency and effectiveness in group or company performance.  So as this imitative is implemented, managers need to be continually evaluating effectiveness, changing systems so that performance can be sustained and identifying some of the cultural barriers that may hinder progress.