Operational Excellence is often defined in a myriad of ways. Some organizations define it as using a certain manufacturing method, being customer-focused, or keeping an employee-centric mindset. However, working on these individual elements alone will inevitably result in a plateau of excellence. How do we define operational excellence? To us, operational excellence must start with a foundation of safety and strategic clarity and be supported by key principles.
The biggest challenge to achieving and sustaining operational excellence is creating cultural change. It goes beyond setting the right goals and requires engaging your entire workforce in the process. By involving all employees and gaining buy in to the core goals and strategies, the team can develop the right habits and systems to enable operational excellence for the long-term.
Achieving cultural change is hard. The unknown can be frightening to employees. Businesses are looking to proven, comprehensive systems they can trust and understand. The Milliken Performance System, the underlying system of our operational excellence consulting, is a holistic system that can help your manufacturing organization transform.
Like other manufacturing management strategies, such as Six Sigma and lean manufacturing, the Milliken Performance System helps businesses achieve operational excellence which helps increase productivity, quality, and efficiency. What makes our system unique is the way we examine and ultimately change a business culture from both the bottom up and top down, resulting in sustainable operations improvement.
Transforming Strategic Clarity into aligned action, the Daily Management System is a systematic operational management process. Development of a robust Daily Management System aligns an organization towards common business objectives through cascaded key performance indicators and ensures achievement through each individual’s daily activities, review cadence, standardized work and layered audits.
Daily Team Maintenance provides operators with the knowledge and skills required to proactively prevent breakdowns and off-quality caused by accelerated equipment deterioration and abnormalities. DTM results in improved reliability and stability—specifically a reduction of minor stops, breakdowns, and changeover time, all of which are common obstacles to operational excellence.
More than just housekeeping, the 5S process organizes and maintains the workplace environment to increase productivity and safety, reduce waste, and eliminate non-value-added activities for all associates. This process establishes the expectations of discipline and overall engagement in the organization.
This standardized training process ensures that all associates are doing the right things, the right way, every time. By modeling key areas, organizations experience a decrease in process variation, turnover, and overall training spend.
Focused Improvement projects follow methodology to provide a logical thinking process that identifies root causes of opportunities in order to reduce or even eliminate losses. These projects generate funding while improving the capability of processes.
The goals of production control are to reduce overall system cost by eliminating system waste in operations processes and aligning the business offering with manufacturing execution. Production control improves working capital and inventory, variable conversion cost, capacity utilization, and more.
For reliability and continuous improvement, a combination of preventive, predictive, and zero failure activities is necessary. Maintenance technicians and leadership and engineers oversee maintenance schedules to address problems before they occur.
This systematic methodology helps achieve zero quality defects by seeking out, identifying, and eliminating the root causes of all defects. QM takes organizational processes beyond reliability to capability.
Early Equipment Management focuses on improved reliability and stability by “designing out” losses related to equipment startup before they occur. Utilizing existing measurement data operators, technicians, and others use a process of implementation and equipment modeling to reduce startup time, cut costs, and reach operational excellence.
Concurrent New Product Development uses a methodology that brings together all the necessary functions at the appropriate time to effectively plan, develop, and manufacture new products that (1) satisfy customer requirements and (2) meet internal measures of success.
Milliken has been refining our processes for decades, and we’ve discovered common elements to successfully implement change for operational excellence. It all starts with leaderships commitment, alignment, and involvement. Next, there must be organizational alignment and all key associates must be educated on what’s important. Performance Solutions by Milliken, named among the best production operations consultants by ALM Intelligence, follows a 6-step approach to implementation.
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Benefits from an operations Performance System are often seen in production quality, capital utilization, safety management, and cost of goods sold. Results realized by clients of Performance Solutions by Milliken are:
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE EDUCATION & TRAINING
We offer a number of operational excellence training courses and conferences throughout the year. Explore Milliken’s effective processes through in-depth discussion and a private plant tour at our Operational Excellence Seminar.
Operational Excellence Conference
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