In order to remain competitive in an increasingly competitive world, businesses must boost their operational performance whenever and wherever it’s possible. It’s vital to maintain it or be at risk of being left behind. Every new day gives you the opportunity to move your business forward from its current situation, and that’s the beauty of it. With there being so many ways to boost operational performance, being aware of the steps to take to drive continuous improvements in order to maintain your competitive edge and ensure continuous growth is key.
Perfecting processes
Every company is familiar with the broad challenge of improving work efficiency and streamlining costs to boost profitability. The need to perfect processes plays a key role. Any new procedures, strategic or not, that your company is planning to implement must be dissected with high levels of scrutiny, and criticism should be welcome in order for it to be as close to quintessential as possible.
Once these procedures have been introduced, rigorous tracking and feedback concerning its effectiveness should continue to be carried out. It’s easy to let things continue to run as they are once your company is doing well. However, if we want to pursue excellence, it’s important to regularly review progress as it helps you decide where to take your business next.
By having these consistent procedures across a company, it will no doubt increase cohesion between work departments, as well as ensuring simpler work processes.
Leveraging data to improve operational performance
You must decide on the most important metrics to evaluate the success of your organisation. Is it the satisfaction of your customers? Sales? Cost reduction? Measuring all business objectives and metrics is vital to streamlining operational efficiency. Every company needs to have clear what are the top metrics, what is usually known as the scorecard, but also what are the dimensions, metrics and information that they want to be able to understand deeper.
Companies should be open to the idea of employing business analytics tools to help make sense of the data which can then lead to informed decisions. But first and most important, companies need to clearly identify what are the data assets that are relevant to understand the customers, business and operations.
So, having the right data and a clear purpose for these data, we can then implement the analytics strategy needed to transform these data into reliable insights that will allow us to identify opportunities for improving our operations.
Performance improvement X-ray, benchmarks and technological innovation
Companies usually find themselves asking the question “where does the operational full potential lie along the value chain, and how do we achieve it?”. Introducing performance improvement X-ray can provide benefits across the entire company. It involves an in-depth screen of key performance decisions, including procurement, production, service, distribution and administration. The result is a dashboard of the most important cost and improvement potentials throughout the company.
It’d be beneficial to keep in mind the operational performance improvement potential, and apply the 10 performance levers that the X-ray is geared to as they have proved to be valuable over the years. These levers are:
- Reducing procurement costs
- Optimizing production
- Optimizing distribution
- Optimizing after-sales service
- Reducing overhead costs
- Optimizing IT
- Reducing product complexity
- Reducing product costs
- Reducing working capital
- Optimizing capital expenditure
The point of benchmarking is to determine the targets for numerous Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that embrace all company functions. Benchmarking creates real competitive advantage, as it involves looking outward to examine how others achieve their performance levels, and to understand the processes that they’ve implemented. When applied appropriately, it can lead to improved performance in critical functions within a business.
The rate of technological advance is one of the biggest challenges businesses face today, which means businesses must be proactive or risk becoming irrelevant. To remain efficient and relevant, your technologies should be kept updated and improved on a regular basis. And not just that, if we want to improve our operations we would need to probably innovate in our products and processes, which means also scope for the technologies needed to lever this innovation.
Employee engagement
When it comes to improve operational performance within an organisation, the power of satisfied employees shouldn’t be underestimated. Employees make a company, so it’s vital to keep track of their thoughts and experiences in order to keep the feelings of engagement up. Help them understand the importance of their role in the business and how their job impacts the business as a whole.
Breakthrough innovation comes from a culture that encourages employees to make a personal commitment toward the successful future of your organization, so it’s key to make them feel valued.
Summary
Investing in improving your operational performance is crucial to any successful business. It’s in place to identify problems and create solutions. It’s important to understand that every challenge that is encountered should be seen as an opportunity to become better. A mindset of continual improvement should be taken in with open arms, and adopted to ensure a company remains forward-looking.
Operational performance efficiency combines many different aspects, which involve the use of metrics, streamlining processes, technological innovation etc. By coming up with ways that will help better your company through these suggestions, it should help you envision what exactly you want to achieve, and what you want the business to eventually become.
