When operational excellence is not enough
Operational excellence can make a company better at what it already does. Competitiveness demands something harder: knowing when what made you excellent yesterday will not be enough tomorrow.
Operational excellence deserves its place in manufacturing. Stable processes, disciplined execution, continuous improvement and relentless attention to waste can produce formidable performance.
But excellence is always excellence within a context.
A plant can improve OEE while its product economics deteriorate. It can shorten changeovers while customers demand a different service model. It can reduce conversion cost while competitors change the basis of competition altogether.
” You can become exceptionally good at a system that is becoming less relevant.
That is where operational excellence reaches its boundary.
Competitiveness requires organisations not only to improve existing capabilities, but to recognise when new capabilities must be built, old assumptions abandoned and different parts of the enterprise synchronised around a changed reality.
Operational excellence remains essential. It is simply not sufficient.
Punirman Perspective
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Operational excellence improves the performance of the system you have. Transformation changes what the organisation is capable of when the system you have is no longer enough.
Related Thinking
A question worth taking away
Are we becoming better at what matters next,
or merely better at what mattered before?
