Operational Transformation Benefits, Regardless of Company Size
Operational Transformation can sound like a scary perspective to take on. Not only does it not have to sound scary, but it can be such a relief for your team’s workload when implemented. These types of changes aren’t planned and executed overnight, they take planning and strategic implementations, including a change management effort.
It’s all worth it in the end.
To break this down in the most simplified way, let’s jump into a quick scenario. Your team has recently grown and your organization is achieving a high throughput than ever before but still feels like it’s not moving fast enough. At a critical pace for growth, your team has been stuck in the storming mode (Add definition and LINK). While things seem great, they could be better. Looking into your processes you look for efficiencies and opportunities for improvement.
Considering the vast variables in processes and how many times they may be completed in an hour, day, week, year, etc… some small changes have the potential to make a massive impact!
Imagine your process takes 4 hours start to finish to complete and can be done concurrently by 6 team members based on space and equipment. While this seems great and the team is growing and performing well based on the old process, what if you save 15 minutes through improved efficiencies? 15 minutes, twice a shift / day, for 6 people, and you’re immediately saving 180 minutes in a day of processes. While that is almost a full additional throughput, it may mean the difference between routinely completing the process once daily per person, to ensure it can routinely be completed twice daily per person. When we look at it this way, we are nearly doubling the throughput.
Efficiencies come in many shapes and sizes. Eliminating waste is always my favorite improvement to make. What are the 8 wastes?
Defects, Over Production, Waiting, Non-Utilized Talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, and Extra Processing. While I could talk about each of these in depth, we’ll save that for another day.
The BENEFITS of operational transformations is where we want to focus today. Improvements that seem small, are compounded to be exceptionally large across a team, organization, and into a year(s). The perceived pain of high level changes and transformations needs to be worth it to the teams and leadership. It takes a few key elements for a successful transformation: The right Talent to plan and execute the changes. The right Technology to facilitate the changes. Lastly, the Ways of Working to create the new efficiencies, including leadership and change champions.
Key Benefits broken down by success factors:
Talent – Bringing the RIGHT players to the table. Who can lead? Who can organize? Who can execute? The benefits of great talent are exceptional motivation and commitment across the team experiencing the organizational transformation.
Technology – We all know technology makes the world go round, but the right technology means you have the ability to facilitate an easier transition and easier maintenance of your new process. The benefit here is a vehicle to success that is a common denominator for all users.
Ways of Working – Bringing the process down to each and every user requires a standard way of working. While this sometimes eliminates unique strategy, we want to maintain a consistent baseline strategy as the core way of working, allowing for the fine details to be executed in a way that works best for each individual and their team. The ways of working provide the benefit of a consistent and reliable result, each and every time.
Organizational Transformations increase efficiencies, build stronger and closer teams (think about how your ways of working can build team-based dynamics), and ultimately create a better product through a well defined process. Build your leadership with your next transformation.
Need a little guidance? Reach out!