Naujienos

Operational excellence

Principles of Operational Excellence The search for improvement is instinctive. For businesses and indeed any organization to be successful in the long term, they must be engaged in a relentless quest to make things better. Failure to make this an organizational priority will inevitably result in organizational decline. Excellence must be the pursuit of all great leaders. In fact, the passionate pursuit of perfection, even knowing it is fundamentally impossible to achieve, brings out the very best in every human being. Why so Many Fail Improvement is hard work! It requires great leaders, smart managers and empowered people; all three. Improvement cannot be delegated down, organized into a program or trained into the people. Improvement requires more than the application of a new tool set or the power of a charismatic personality. Improvement requires the transformation of a culture to one where every single person is engaged every day in often small and from time to time, significant change. In reality, every organization is naturally in some state of transformation. The critical question is, to what end is the organization being transformed and who are the architects of the transformation? The Shingo model of operational excellence asserts that successful organizational transformation occurs when leaders understand and take personal responsibility for architecting a deep and abiding culture of continuous improvement. This is not something that can be delegated to others. As the CEO of a very successful organization recently said; “Leaders lead culture!” A Culture Based on Correct Principles Dr. Stephen Covey describes principles as fundamental truths. He defines a principle as something that is universally understood, timeless in its meaning and inarguable because it is self-evident. He teaches that values govern our actions and principles govern the consequences of our actions. In contrast, values are cultural, personal, interpretable and variable. Our values influence our choices for how to behave. Principles govern the outcomes of our choices. In other words, the values of an unprincipled person will very likely have very negative consequences. Principles govern the laws of science and physics, they determine the consequences of human relationships, and; ultimately, correct principles influence the successful outcomes of business endeavors. Building a lasting culture of improvement requires the cultures that leaders build be grounded in universal and timeless principles that govern business excellence.

Why Operational Excellence? For decades we have watched, and all too often experienced, the disappointing efforts of programmatic improvement initiatives, leaving in their wake a trail of unintended negative consequences; rarely resulting in lasting improvement. Quality Circles, Just-in-Time, Total Quality Management, Business Process Re-engineering, Six Sigma, and most recently, Lean; are a few illustrations of well intentioned initiatives that have far under-delivered on their promised benefits. Our study of these programs over the last 25 years has led us to believe that the problem has nothing to do with the concepts and everything to do with the programmatic, tool oriented deployment of them. The Shingo model for operational excellence is based on a systematic study of each of these improvement initiatives. Our approach bi-passes the tools that each program has engendered and focuses rather on the underlying/guiding principles and supporting key concepts behind them. We recognize the necessity of good improvement tools but focus on them only within the context of enabling a system to better drive ideal, principle based behaviors. The Shingo “House” provides a summary and categorization of this collection of guiding principles and supporting concepts. When taken in their totality, these timeless principles become the basis for building a lasting culture of excellence in the execution of ones mission statement. We call this relationship between business results and principle based behavior, “Operational Excellence”. Operational Excellence cannot be a program, another new set of tools or a new management fad. Operational Excellence is the consequence of an enterprise-wide practice of ideal behaviors, based on correct principles. When leaders anchor the corporate mission, vision and values in principles of operational excellence and help associates to connect and anchor their personal values in the same principles, they accelerate a transformation of thinking, behavior and therefore a lasting culture of operational excellence.

Principles of Operational Excellence (The Shingo House) .

The Shingo House is a categorization of the guiding principles of operational excellence. Associated with each category are also listed important supporting concepts. The principles are categorized into four dimensions: cultural enablers, continuous process improvement, enterprise alignment, and results, the ultimate end of all business initiative. The dimensions overlay five core business processes – product/service development, customer relations, operations, supply – and a variety of management or administrative support processes.

Guiding Principles

The Shingo Prize did not create the ten guiding principles of operational excellence, but rather they have always existed. In truth, there is ample evidence that these principles have been well understood and practiced over many millennia. As the world has gone through cycles of advancement and decline, it seems these principles are routinely forgotten and must be discovered over and over again. Emerging from the dark ages into the period of enlightenment and industrialization, these principles are only recently coming back to the fore. The Shingo Prize has made a diligent search of thought leaders over the last 100 years. Their work has been carefully analyzed and dissected and the unique concepts or principles from each have been extracted. Compiling, distilling and prioritizing the list led to the ten guiding principles on the left side and the supporting concepts for each dimension on the right side of the house. Supporting concepts are critical to pay attention to but may not stand up to the rigor of being universal, timeless and self-evident as are the principles. The dimensions are the result of ‘thinking categorically about the principles.’ It is clear that all four dimensions of the model require focus in order to achieve excellence. In the same way that we need to comprehend objects in three dimensions to truly appreciate all of their characteristics; operational excellence must be viewed in these four dimensions in order to fully comprehend it.