Excerpt from: The elusiveness of operational excellence

Doubtless you have heard the term “operational excellence” used before, perhaps even in your own organization. It seems that many businesses want to be operationally excellent – after all, who would not want that? I cannot say I have ever met an organization who wanted to be operationally average. But often those desires go unfulfilled as organizations fail to make the necessary changes to transition from average to excellent.

Last week I was presenting to a group on this very topic of operational excellence. I started by attempting to define the term which is harder than it may appear. As with so many business buzzwords, nailing down a precise definition proved a bit challenging. However, despite the existence of more definitions for “operational excellence” than Baskin-Robbins flavors (by my count they are up to 46), we can minimally agree that it involves maximizing the value your organization produces, while at the same time limiting waste and inefficiencies within the business.

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