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Rethinking Operational Excellence Moving from Central to Circular

Operational Excellence: Navigating Sustainability Challenges

Many organisations embark on the journey to operational excellence to achieve key business goals such as greater efficiency, productivity, and agility. A study indicates that over 40% of organisations are utilising operational excellence methodologies to achieve customer delight. However, while the number of organisations understanding the importance of operational excellence and initiating projects is significant, the number of organisations that are able to sustain these initiatives remains low.

This often occurs as organisations entrust operational excellence initiatives to a limited group of resources to drive. Despite these dedicated teams collecting the right process information and building detailed process maps, they often struggle to drive adoption, secure commitment from team members, and achieve desired outcomes.

The solution lies in moving operational excellence programs away from isolation and involving different layers of the organisation, including middle managers, team leaders, and executives, to commit to these programs. This is where the Circle of Excellence proves to be a game-changer.

What is a Circle of Excellence?

The Circle of Excellence revolutionises the approach to operational excellence by shifting from isolated efforts to collaborative engagement across the organisation. It fosters multi-layered involvement, ensuring that every role contributes effectively to drive engagement, adoption, and ultimately, success.

At its core, the Circle of Excellence merges the expertise of the Centre of Excellence with the active participation of other stakeholders in a unified journey towards operational excellence. It encompasses various roles, each with defined capacities to execute the cycle of building, maintaining, endorsing, suggesting, and engaging.

Circle of Excellence includes the following roles:

  • Center of Excellence/Process Guidance team, which is responsible for building/re-engineering process repository.
  • Process Champions from business units of value chain to engage in the creation and maintenance of process repository.
  • Process Owners to endorse and collaborate on process repository.
  • Process Participants to follow process and suggest changes.

Why Circular Approach Vs Central Approach

Circle of Excellence Centre of Excellence
Brings along every layer in the organisation towards driving process improvement and achieving operational excellence A dedicated team working on operational excellence goals, resulting in lack of engagement from other team members
Collaborative and Continuous efforts driving process and operational excellence Isolated and disconnected efforts leading to loss of momentum
Drives process adherence and adoption by ensuring employee engagement Lack of process adoption and resistance from front-end employees

How to Operationalise a Circle of Excellence

To establish a Circle of Excellence, three key elements must align:
Methodology, People, and Tool.

Methodology

A standard methodology focusing on driving Continuous Business Improvement is at the center of establishing a Circle of Excellence.

For a methodology to be systematic, structured, best practice and result oriented, it needs to have five phases:

Process Scoping

This phase involves the development of a process library/ catalogue, which holds the name of business processes in the organisation. It helps identify the high-priority processes that have high customer touch, high pain, and high risk, which can directly impact the bottom line and require urgent attention. Process scoping also clarifies who owns which processes in the organisation.
1

Process Review

Once the high-priority processes are identified in the Scoping phase, they are assessed in the review phase to understand how they are currently performing in the organisation. The Review phase involves various analytics techniques, such as cost, value and root cause analysis. Hence, providing the ability to identify business pain points and process issues. These insights set the foundation for the next stage of process improvement.
2

Process Improvement

With insights gained from the Process Review phase, organisations proceed to identify the right improvement opportunities. The goal is to eliminate waste, reduce handoff points, streamline activities, and enhance overall efficiency. Processes are then redesigned as per identified improvements. During this phase, organisations must demonstrate the potential benefits that will be realised through the redesigned process. This is instrumental in securing approvals and commitment from stakeholders, ensuring that all are aligned with the proposed changes and the value they will bring.
3

Process Implementation

The fourth phase involves a series of meticulously planned activities to facilitate a seamless transition from old processes to newly designed and optimised ones. The transition includes the integration of redesigned processes into full operational processes within the organisation’s day-to-day activities. Listing down change projects, assigning responsibilities and monitoring them is key in this phase to ensure a seamless go-live. Change projects should be defined and responsibilities should be assigned across various teams, including Operational Excellence Teams, Process Excellence Team, IT Team, Subject Matter Experts, Business Users, etc, to ensure envisioned improvements are transitioned into operational reality.
4

Process Monitoring

This stage is focused on ensuring that the future state of the process is consistently delivering the expected value. A set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) needs to be established and measured to gauge if the process is delivering as expected. A key element is also collaboration to drive continuous improvement. The front-end team members should be engaged and suggest process improvements, which need to go through the cycle of review, improve, implement, publish and monitor, to drive continuous improvement.
5

People

This is the second pillar in establishing the Circle of Excellence. People with required skill set should be chosen and their responsibilities needs to be clearly defined. Below are the roles required to establish the Circle of Excellence and their individual responsibilities.

Process Guidance Team/ Process Analysts
  • Facilitate Process Library Build Workshops
  • Design and Maintain Process Library
  • Mentor and Guide Process Champions
  • Design, Analyse, Improve and Implement processes
Process Champions/ Process Editors
  • Design Business Unit’s processes
  • Maintain process maps and other information
  • Make changes to processes based on Approved change requests.
Process Owners
  • The gateway for the processes to the End Users (Participants)
  • Participate in Process Library Build Workshops
  • Approve new Processes and updates to processes (Authorise publishing)
  • Reinforce and support Process Management within the business unit, especially for the Process Participants that complete their processes.
Process Participants
  • Participate in Process Interviews to capture current state process information
  • Participate in Process Confirmation Sessions following Process Interviews for Current State Process
  • Participate in process execution
  • Provide feedback on processes and improvement ideas
  • Participate in Process Improvement projects.

Tool

This is the third key element in establishing a Circle of Excellence. An end-to-end tool that takes the organisation through the phases of process mapping, analysis, redesign, implementation, change management, and collaboration and monitoring proves a game changer in the journey towards Continuous Improvement. A tool is a must-have as it drives the behaviour automatically. With thousands of processes in the business, an appropriate toolset is the only way to ensure business units are on the same page and mapping, analysing and improving consistently.

While there is no one-size-fits-all tool, organisations must assess their critical needs and evaluate tool requirements to make the right choice. However, certain features are considered must-haves in any tool.

Integrated Methodology

A toolset equipped with an integrated methodology offers users a comprehensive framework throughout the process enhancement journey, right from initial process design and analysis to iterative improvement and collaborative efforts. This ensures a seamless progression from one stage to the next, promoting a systematic and efficient approach to process optimisation. Opting for a BPM tool that embeds established best practices such as Six Sigma, Lean principles, and Value Stream Mapping can significantly enhance the output of process improvement endeavours.

In-built Analytics

Business Process Analysis is at the center of driving improvement initiatives. By delivering insights into potential areas for improvement, it helps organisations target their improvement initiatives. A tool that offers instant access to key metrics such as process time, value, cost, efficiency, and performance facilitates data-driven decision-making and fosters continuous improvement.

In-built BPMN

A tool embedded with a worldwide recognised language for modelling business processes, such as BPMN, ensures standardised documentation. This helps in creating accurate maps with the essential details.

Ready to Set Up Your Circle of Excellence?

When setting up a Circle of Excellence, it’s crucial to identify the right governance model for your process mapping team. Based on your current business process maturity, you need to evaluate centralised or decentralised which governance model works for your process mapping team.

Watch this 30-min On-Demand Process Governance Crash Course to Assess your Organisation’s Process Maturity and choose the best-fit Governance Model.

Assess the Best-Fit Governance Model
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