Operational Excellence Principles

Companies work to produce better, faster and cheaper products that exceed customers' expectations being effective and efficient in delivering value. For these organizations to constantly generate improvements and deliver results, they are working endlessly to pursue operational excellence.

Operational excellence is an enterprise-wide strategy that is aligned across different processes, functions and levels, both horizontally and vertically within the organizational structure to consistently drive the right behaviors and results. 

What Is Operational Excellence System?

Through an Operational Excellence System, everyone is engaged, enabled, and empowered to achieve operational excellence and the desired results for competitive advantage. 

Operational excellence is about how to operationally improve to work better, faster, and cheaper while delivering superior value to customers. Operational Excellence System support that all the processes are effective and efficient at delivering value, consistently reducing losses and improving your organization's processes, products, and services for sustained competitive advantage. Creating the Zero Loss Mindset and right behaviors will engage and enable every associate to be operationally excellent.

Cara Thompson, Director of Corporate MPS at Milliken, says that it’s common for people to equate Operational to only Manufacturing but Operational Excellence means having the mindset and behaviors where everybody and every process of a company can be operationally excellent.

This is why at Milliken, we believe Operational Excellence connects everyone in some way. 

Milliken Performance System (MPS)

The Milliken Performance System (MPS) brings operational excellence to life by embracing leadership and problem solving in pursuit of sustainable organizational growth. The Milliken Performance System (MPS), is defined as a systems-based methodology that builds capabilities, drives cost competitiveness, and supports aligned growth with the company.  

MPS helps businesses achieve operational excellence which increases 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. 

The Operational Effectiveness Approach

This approach results in sustainable operations improvement. Regardless of the size of a company, operational effectiveness is crucial to the success of the enterprise. Utilizing a performance system is how you can accelerate Operational Improvement. It isn’t only about reducing costs or increasing productivity, but also creating a company culture that enables everyone to produce products valued by customers and achieve sustainable growth. 

Many operational improvements are thought about as a project with a start and end date like a one-off event. But Operational Excellence must be beyond Operational Improvement. 

As Sebastian Giraldo, Senior Practitioner and LATAM Business Development Leader, shares in a recent article, a performance system is a long-term commitment that requires consistent effort and discipline, which is increasingly scarce, but the structures that are created and the behaviors that are encouraged allow results to be accelerated and offer an advantage that an organization can achieve.

The systematic approach using continuous cycles involves several areas and levels of the organization. Working as a system based on components seeks to eliminate losses but in a consistent way that looks for ways to improve, learn and sustain over time and involve a larger number of people in each cycle. There are multiple tools and leadership is not fleeting or intermittent allowing the leaders to be immersed in the improvement process. They know the tools, connect with the operational floor and offer constant support for the development of new skills, which breaks with obsolete administration schemes and allows a real connection with the organization.

Achieving excellence requires assessing and refining your processes until you can consistently produce results every time. 

Operational Improvement Cycle

The cycle of continuous improvement focuses on reducing wastes and streamlining processes. Partnering this with an Operational Excellence mindset is where the real benefits come in. This allows you to create a company culture that involves, engages and empowers your entire workforce to become problem-solvers.

Each methodology within MPS is a lever designed to address specific losses—locked potential that can be delivered back to a business by improving the manufacturing process. These levers can be used individually or in combination allowing each plant to design their approach to best achieve specific business goals. Our operating system is a framework that is built and improved over time based on MPS improvement methodologies. As we grow and learn, we apply those takeaways to new situations.  

In a mature state of Operational Excellence, leaders and associates are engaged with each other and the process. The performance system has created enabled associates who are capable and confident in owning their process and performance. The leaders have empowered associates to do so by leading in a way that creates the environment and sacred time to do the continuous improvement work. When an Operational Excellence Model looks like this, we should continue to strive for all members of the organization to behave as problem solvers who own the process. In addition, operational excellence means having the mindset and behaviors where everybody wants to and can be operationally excellent. Everyone is engaged, enabled, and empowered to achieve operational excellence and the desired results for competitive advantage. 

Increase Team Morale through Cross-functional Cooperation

The importance of improving and keeping up with workplace collaboration is that at times company leaders can become sidetracked while examining quantitative metrics, optimizing procedures, and implementing new technologies in their quest to increase operational performance. However, it's important to remember to encourage team morale to establish a culture of productive cooperation and foster strong connections between people and across various teams to improve overall efficiency. 

Leadership In Operational Excellence 

Leadership has some roles and responsibilities inside an Operational Excellence System, including managing a reward and recognition program and a communication plan that inspires associates to support the system, feel strongly about it, and reinforce the strategy alignment across the enterprise, encouraging the right mindset and behaviors is what leadership is in Operational Excellence.

Operational Excellence develops the right skills and knowledge to ensure that everyone can excel, by providing them with the means to identify deviations and identify losses, knowing what to do, when to act, and what actions to take to deliver value to customers. Empower them to have sufficient authority that's consistent with their roles and responsibility, creating accountability.

Professionals who have received the proper skills and recognition are very enthusiastic about their jobs and much more likely to help create a culture of continual improvement. Additionally, retaining long-term professionals who are happy, efficient, and deeply engaged helps guarantee the long-term success of the Operational Excellence System.

Operational Excellence & Performance Solutions by Milliken 

Performance Solutions by Milliken is ideally positioned to assist companies to get the most out of their Operational Excellence System. By concentrating on the primary forces to drive organizational change, Performance Solutions by Milliken assists businesses in making significant and long-lasting improvements to their company operations and effectiveness, achieving a cultural transformation. Performance Solutions by Milliken can help businesses utilize different framework approaches to identify constraint areas and find opportunities for operational process improvements. 

There are innumerous advantages for company efficiency, but the long term benefits beyond the operational improvement are the big opportunities that will sustain the results and change the culture. Performance Solutions by Milliken can help companies and organizations to implement Performance Systems to improve their operations, bringing Operational Excellence to life.