Operational Excellence

Overview

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A leading retail and logistics company with 18,000 employees sought assistance with installing an Operational Excellence framework.  Their goals were to drive cultural change, establish a single way of working, and improve enterprise performance, to ultimately produce cost savings.  The business suffered from silo and fragmented working, task duplication, and unnecessary complexity.  Knee-jerk reactions and short-term fixes to problems was common with solutions often based on ‘feel’ rather than data.  There was a lack of features such as process improvement capability within the teams, rigour surrounding project selection and cross-functional project coordination, demand management, resource allocation, improvement methodology, benefits tracking and governance.

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Approach

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•Current state maturity assessment of process improvement capabilities, leadership, & culture strategy, project success rate, and performance management to determine weaknesses, opportunities, and to establish a baseline.

•Created and tailored an Operational Excellence vision centred around a “community of process specialists”.

•Designed a future state Centre of Excellence with ‘hub and spoke’ structure, where most resources would be embedded within departments to enhance engagement, while benefiting from hub characteristics such as sharing best practise.

•Established a mandate for the Centre of Excellence to drive process efficiency, promote best practice methodologies, provide tools and templates, oversee the project pipeline, and ensure project selection aligns with C-level objectives. The Centre would also track benefits, manage PMO governance, and offer flexible resource solutions to meet fluctuating demand.

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Outcome

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•Developed an Operational Excellence roadmap to drive enterprise-level cultural change, single way of working, and achieve process efficiency, resulting in £5.2 million net annual financial savings.

•Led three cross-functional improvement projects to demonstrate "what good looks like" in terms of project charters, rigorous data-driven methodologies, working group mobilisation and facilitation, PMO governance with C-level executives, and rapid execution.