ABSTRACT
Depending upon the company or institution, Operations Excellence can be defined in many ways; however, what is fundamental to all definitions is that Operations Excellence consists of programs and processes necessary to establish a disciplined and structured operation that ensures mission success. Operations Excellence is not defined by each employee, or by select individuals within the organization, but rather by a collaborative team of employees, which may include representatives from Senior Management, first-line Supervisors, and front-line workers. The end objective is to identify those operational activities, tasks, processes, and programs that need additional focus, discipline, and rigor to ensure a consistent outcome.
In essence, an Operations Excellence Program builds upon the streamlining of work processes and systems accomplished through implementation of Lean, but also adds a level of discipline to work processes and tasks that have been improved upon by a Human Performance Improvement (HPI) program.
Within the Peak Performance Model, the traditional Operations Excellence approach has been tailored to recognize that mission-critical processes vary amongst companies, organizations, and institutions. There are five core functions to an Operations Excellence Program presented in this chapter:
Identify mission-critical processes
Define and identify mission-critical operations and activities that are key to successfully completing mission-critical processes
Establish the company or institution’s Operations Excellence Program Elements
Implement the Operations Excellence Program
Evaluate and implement Program improvements
When launching the program, Management should consider developing a communications and/or training plan to emphasize the value of the program to both the company and the worker.
There are a number of tools that can be used to assess adequacy of an Operations Excellence Program. Program evaluations should target improvement of different work groups (i.e., employee, first-line Supervisors, Mid-Level and Senior Management) and different organizations. No matter what tools are used in evaluating program performance and program recommendation, the evaluation team should include representatives from different work groups and management.
