Becoming “Operational” Excellent

4/12/2011 at 2:30 pm by The Sage ERP Team

“Excellence” is a word you’ve probably seen thousands of times in your professional and academic life.

From stickers reading “Excelente!” on your eighth grade Spanish papers to college professors demanding that you perform excellently in their classrooms, being excellent means being better than great. And now it has followed you from the classroom to the boardroom, because we’re about to talk to you about operational excellence.

Unlike your eighth grade Spanish paper, 0perational excellence is directly applicable to your business and your career.

Operational excellence is a business philosophy that aims to make your business, well, excellent. (Sick of that word yet? We’re just warming up.) It centers around focusing on the needs of the customer, empowering employees to contribute to the company on a major scale and making processes throughout all levels of the business as efficient and streamlined as they can get. For these reasons, operational excellence isn’t just about improving human resources outputs – it’s also about improving the day-to-day activities that take place within your business. It’s a comprehensive philosophy that looks at the whole of the business as being greater than the sum of its parts.

Like ERP, operational excellence – often abbreviated to OE – is a business-wide solution that doesn’t just fix one issue, it fixes a whole slew. Traditional approaches for problem-solving in business are kind of like lap-band surgery for people who are morbidly overweight: They fix the problem, but don’t address the underlying cause. OE, on the other hand, is the diet and exercise program that will result in long-lasting, substantial changes. OE is the diet that your business needs to become a lean manufacturer. It’s not a quick-fix. It’s a true change.

Look, you’ve got a few problems. We’re not trying to be harsh here; nobody’s perfect. Honestly assess your business and ask yourself, where can I improve? No matter what the answer is, implementing OE practices at your company will help. Your problem may require additional tweaking, but OE, with its broad approach to overhauling company values and focusing on the elements of a business that truly produce positive results, will be good for you.

If you’re ready to make your business excellent – in every sense of the world – OE is the best place to start.