More than a set of tools
Operational excellence (OpEx) is often confused with lean, Six Sigma or a cost-reduction programme. Those are methods it draws on. The goal is a culture and management system in which improvement is part of everyone's daily work, rather than a project run by a specialist team.
Core principles
Most OpEx frameworks, including the Shingo Model, share principles such as:
- Respect for people: those closest to the work are best placed to improve it.
- Focus on the process: problems are usually caused by the process, not the person.
- Flow and pull: value moves to the customer without delays, waste or overproduction.
- Quality at the source: defects are prevented or caught where they occur.
- Scientific thinking: improvement follows plan-do-check-act and root cause analysis.
- Constancy of purpose: everyone understands the strategy and how their work contributes.
The building blocks
- Strategy deployment. Translating a few breakthrough objectives into goals and measures at every level, often using hoshin kanri.
- Standard work. A documented best way of doing each task, which is the baseline for improvement.
- Daily management. Tiered meetings, visual boards and leader standard work that expose and escalate problems every day.
- Problem solving and continuous improvement. Structured methods such as A3, PDCA and the 5 whys, applied by teams at all levels.
- Capability building. Skills matrices, coaching and training so people can do and improve the work.
- Reliable assets and safe work. Total productive maintenance and proactive safety management.
Common pitfalls
- Treating OpEx as a programme with an end date.
- Running improvement events without a daily management system to sustain the gains.
- Leaving improvement to a central team while frontline staff are not involved.
- Measuring activity, such as number of projects, instead of outcomes.
- Using separate, disconnected systems for safety, quality, maintenance and production.
Example
A food manufacturer sets a site objective to reduce changeover losses. The objective is cascaded to line teams, who track changeover time on their tier boards. Problems are escalated through tier meetings, root causes are analysed with A3s, and the improved method becomes the new standard work, which is then trained using the skills matrix.