Operational Excellence is a philosophy where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership results driven by a consistently and demanding implementation of the company business strategy. The process involves focusing on the customers' needs, keeping the employees positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace.
Operational Excellence drivers are based on continuous improvement methodologies, such as Lean Thinking, Innovation, Six Sigma and Scientific Management, but also integrates Organizational structure and Leadership development.
An Operationally Excellent company will have lower operational risk, lower operating costs, and increased revenues relative to its competitors, creating value for customers and shareholders and should be key for Asset Management success.
Improving your asset management system may require further operational excellence initiatives as lean, six sigma and process engineering to transform the current status. Operational excellence is a journey that involves transformation by applying the right tools to the right processes, including digitalization when this is more effective.
These programs will help you to support or sustain your asset improvement program with a holistic approach where waste reduction is seen as culture across the entire organization.
Technology innovation are driving business to transform the traditional way of work in Operational Excellence using digitalization, expecting that this change will contribute to manage risk and improve cost, performance, quality and safety.
Digitalization can improve processes, providing new methods and opportunities for the business if the digital transformation is evaluated using a value chain business model, considering that the value created is higher than the cost of creating the value. After the transformation, sustainability is a must, so it is required to change the processes and adapt the skills to this new way of working.
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs to evaluate their success at reaching targets.
Defining the dashboards, using business intelligence will allow you to have a very nice visual appeal to the different levels of the organization that will help you to monitor the performance of your business with a reduction of the administration effort. These dashboards will require the definition of the lead and lag key performance indicators, data collection and analytics tools.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness, designated as OEE is an industry recognized method of measuring how well the asset works compared to its full potential.
The results are stated in a generic form which allows comparison between manufacturing units in differing industries.
The preferred way to calculate OEE = Availability X Performance X Quality and provides a rich understanding of waste in the manufacturing process by breaking it down into the three loss factors.
OEE has also been valued as an effective change agent for bringing maintenance, production and engineering together to address issues that affects operating performance, as measured by OEE losses.
Continuous improvement, also called continual improvement, based on the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle is the ongoing improvement of products, services or processes. Continuous improvement can be implemented by using incremental or breakthrough improvements. These can be applied interchangeably, but the best way to deploy a thorough continuous improvement program is to combine both. By doing this you can deal with quick wins while giving complex and larger projects the time and attention required.
There are a wide variety of continuous improvement methods and methodologies that can be used to achieve the best results such as Six Sigma, Lean, Innovation, Total Quality Management. All that is required is to select or combine those and their tools and the rest is magic.
The benefits of continuous improvement as way of living is to make your company constantly better by improving your practices to make your team and business more efficient, accurate, and effective.
There will always be room to improve your processes and methods!
Innovation can be described as "a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of device or method". Innovation is often understood as the application of better and more effective solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs.
Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products or processes. For businesses, innovation can increase the likelihood of your business succeeding.
Applying innovation management standards as the ISO/CD 50501, or NP4457, will guide your company efforts to the journey of innovation a key factor of success for competitiveness.
Lean thinking is a mindset – a way of viewing the world. Lean is about focus, removing waste, and increasing customer value. Establishing value allows organizations to create a top-down target price. The cost to produce the products and services is then determined. The organization focuses on eliminating waste so that they can deliver the value the customer expects at the highest level of profitability.
Lean is about smooth process flows, doing only those activities that add customer value and eliminating all other activities that don’t. If it doesn’t add value then it must add cost.
Find most used Lean tools: Kaizen, 5S, SMED, Root Cause Analysis, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping, PDCA, from a big toolbox that you can use as needed to reduce waste.
Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process – from development or manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.
Six Sigma is a method that provides organizations tools to improve the capability of their business processes. This increase in performance and decrease in process variation helps lead to defect reduction and improvement in profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services.
To achieve Six Sigma — statistically — a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications. A Six Sigma opportunity is then the total quantity of chances for a defect.
Operator Driven Reliability (ODR) is an asset management program that involves operators in the maintenance reliability of their assets.
In order for the floor operator to become an effective tool in improving the reliability of equipment he/she must be able to predict failures before they occur through the early identification of work and problem solving capable of, that is. To develop operators with this capability there are two critical prerequisites, one the correct training, and two a reliability driven process for the failure analysis and early identification. This makes the operators highly valuable in the maintenance chain.
Root cause analysis is about digging beneath the symptom of a problem. Most organizations mistakenly use the term “root cause” to identify only one main cause. Focusing on a single cause can limit the solutions set, resulting in the exclusion of viable solutions. Root cause investigation provides a simple visual explanation of all the causes that contributed to the incident.
The root is the system of causes that reveals all of the different options for solutions. When using Root cause investigation, the word root in root cause analysis refers to possible cause or causes that are beneath the symptom. The output can result in multiple opportunities to mitigate risk and prevent problems.
If you find the root causes you can solve the problem!
Project Management can be described as the process of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing a project, from its beginning to its completion, to achieve a final goal in a certain period, at a certain cost and quality, through the mobilization of material resources, technological resources, financial resources and human resources.
The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints, reaching the best possible result of the cost-term-quality trinomial.
Thus defined, project management can be applied to asset management projects, operational excellence projects, OEE projects, Lean projects, six sigma projects, Problem solving projects, digital transformation projects, reliability projects, maintenance projects, CMMS/EAM implementation projects, product development and IDI projects, process development projects, acquisition of new equipment, expansion or construction of new sites/factories, process optimization projects, reorganization of the company, transformation process, a training project, an investment project, among others.
The industrialization process takes place through the standardization of all processes (purchases, acceptance, production, and testing) and inspections, using the Industrialization Toolkit. During the industrialization process the necessary equipment to ensure series production is also validated and completed.
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