In today’s dynamic digital landscape, organizations face a myriad of challenges, from interconnected supply chains and globalization to inflation-driven economic pressures and rapid technological advancements. The emergence of new risks, such as cyber threats, increasing regulatory demands and an ever-evolving competitive landscape, further complicate the environment.
To remain competitive, many organizations must undertake an operational excellence (OPEX) transformation program. Such a transformation represents a profound shift in how an organization operates, aimed at improving performance, adapting to changing market conditions and achieving strategic goals. An OPEX program ensures consistent execution, optimal performance and efficiency across all operations, potentially leading to sustainable growth.
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The measures of OPEX encompass both growth-oriented objectives – such as enhancing customer experience, driving business growth and scaling operations – and efficiency metrics like boosting productivity, increasing employee engagement and improving risk management. Achieving sustained OPEX requires a cultural shift within the organization. This shift ensures that execution is consistently aligned with the organization’s purpose, fosters a mindset of continuous improvement, enhances cross-functional collaboration and promotes the effective use of technology. These elements together enable the organization to remain agile and resilient in the face of change.
These transformations are typically complex, multi-year endeavors that require overhauling people, processes and technology environments. Unfortunately, 70 percent of transformations fail because today’s organizations are incredibly complex and maintaining alignment across the organization towards ambitious transformation goals is incredibly difficult. The implication of failure can mean wasted investment, frustrated stakeholders, unsatisfied customers and ultimately lost ground to competitors.
Embracing systems thinking
To succeed, organizations must embrace systems thinking, which addresses this challenge by viewing the organization as interconnected parts and understanding how their relationships collectively impact performance. Systems thinking requires and fosters alignment, ensuring that an organization’s structure, culture, resources and strategies are harmonized and working together to achieve its mission, vision, goals and objectives.
To implement systems thinking and understand the relationships between all parts of your organization, a ground truth is essential. This ground truth serves as the business-oriented anchor that maps every aspect of your operations to ‘what’ your business does, and that anchor is process.
Process has the power to unlock an organization’s operational knowledge, serving as a common language to align your people. It fosters critical accountability that drives individual performance, breaks down silos to encourage teamwork and collaboration and empowers data-driven decision-making.
To achieve this, an organization must create a process taxonomy that captures a comprehensive and accurate representation of all processes, organized hierarchically to serve both strategic decision-makers and ground-level practitioners. While automated techniques can help harvest existing information, such as procedure documents and role descriptions, a structured interview process is essential for validating the accuracy of the data and confirming process ownership with stakeholders.
There is one more essential element to this new model: Operational data. Many organizations have data repositories containing key operational information, such as systems, people, third-party vendors, products and services. In this approach, this data is associated with the relevant processes, creating a single source of truth for all operational intelligence. This is key to systems thinking as it allows organizations to understand how all parts and their relationships function within the context of what truly matters – ‘what’ your business does to operate and serve customers.
Implementing this vision will require senior leadership and key champions providing financial backing and promoting the narrative to gain stakeholder support across the organization. It will also require the following efforts.
Define your why
Every organization faces unique challenges and strategic priorities. It’s crucial to invest the effort upfront to clearly define your OPEX goals and how processes can serve as a critical enabler. Specifically, this means articulating the value proposition, establishing key metrics for success and identifying use cases where this framework will drive enterprise value.
Build a process capability
A centralized team is essential to develop and maintain process models, ensure quality standards, uphold rigorous governance routines and manage data integration. It’s critical to define the roles, accountabilities and competencies required both within this organization and externally, such as for the role of process owners.
Leverage a world class process modeling tool
This unified model of your organization serves as an invaluable resource for stakeholders across your organization. To create and manage it, you need a comprehensive process management tool that provides the essential features to build and maintain this information. Fortunately, there is a mature market of tools offering these capabilities. One leading solution is ARIS, which excels in enabling OPEX through the following critical features:
- Process modeling: ARIS allows you to capture every process in your organization through a well-organized process taxonomy. This structure serves as a single source of truth, enabling transparency for all stakeholders to drive efficiency in what they do.
- Data integration: ARIS enables the creation of libraries of critical operational data. These libraries allow you to associate essential resources, such as IT systems and third-party vendors, with the processes they support. This integration offers visibility into all interdependencies through a common business-oriented lens.
- Impact analysis: With ARIS, you can identify the relationships between resources and processes, offering comprehensive visibility. This enables identification of overlaps and waste that can be streamlined.
- Process mining: ARIS allows real-time insights into the actual performance of key processes by analyzing log data. This capability provides a more accurate understanding of how processes are executed in reality, enabling continuous improvement.
- Governance: Through robust governance features such as workflow management, ARIS ensures that your process taxonomy remains a complete and up-to-date representation of how your business operates. This is crucial for maintaining consistency and accuracy in driving optimal performance.
Secure stakeholder buy-in to change how the organization operates
This model of your organization can be a powerful force for change but only if it’s leveraged to change behaviors and current methods. The linkage to processes can address virtually all transformation and OPEX challenges through broad adoption to this consistent business-oriented view.
- Strategy-to-impact alignment: Identify processes that are strategically important and require investments to maintain customer satisfaction and competitive positioning.
- Transformation strategy and delivery: Identify your transformation strategy, define your roadmap and manage the journey by identifying the precise processes they must transform.
- Driving change efficiently: Delivery efficiency through clarity and aligning process impacts and ownership throughout the entire change lifecycle.
- Delivering an agile IT environment: Arm your enterprise architecture team to deliver an IT environment that aligns with the needs of the business and is agile in the face of future uncertainty.
- Achieving operational efficiency: Remove waste and inefficiency throughout your organization by providing a view of overlaps and redundancies that can be addressed.
- Providing strong risk management: Provide consistent business context that risk managers can leverage to deliver complete risk assessments across all risk types and implement prioritized controls.
This represents a paradigm shift that serves as the antidote to OPEX transformation failures by providing precise ownership and clarity on what must change during the transformation.