Operational excellence: The key factors contributing towards success

Operational excellence focuses on the continuous improvement of our processes, practices, methodologies and tools to help streamline activities.

At Sterling, our operational excellence programme continues to harness the skills and talent that already exist within our business to empower innovation and problem solving,

Here, we explore the key factors contributing towards Sterling’s success on its operational excellence journey.

In line with our values, our leadership team act as role models for employees across the organisation, leading by example. Endorsement is vital to ensure our people thrive within a culture where they feel comfortable, trusted and empowered to recommend and act upon improvement strategies; to perform their jobs well and improve customers’ processes.

Leadership buy-in is especially important, as effectively implementing these strategies may require employees to take time out from their daily roles, which will lead to increased efficiencies in the long-term.

It is important to ensure our employees feel part of our operational excellence journey, and that they are the ones leading the way as we continue to develop. This leads to the ongoing pursuit for improvement, which becomes an integrated part of their daily role and responsibilities, helping us to achieve long term, continual operational excellence and in turn, supporting sustained benefits for our customers.

The operational excellence journey needs to align with the business’ overall objectives to help it achieve its goals but it is also important to take into consideration the needs of each individual site on a local level. One site’s journey may need to look different to another site, but each facility within the global network should still work towards similar goals and objectives, and arrive at the same destination.

Operational excellence needs to be steered, managed and assessed over time to become a sustainable part of our every day working lives, and it is necessary to nominate dedicated team members to oversee this. Not least to understand how and when the landscape changes in any way, so that we are always forward thinking on our strategies.

As a network of global facilities, sharing best practice is a key focus to ensure we learn from each other and continually develop our processes to improve efficiency, speed and flexibility.

The diverse experience, technologies and expertise across our six sites provides multiple opportunities to learn, develop and support best practies.

Nurturing a culture where sharing knowledge, asking for advice and problem solving across boundaries is vital for operational excellence. The ‘always learning’ mindset means that employees can be open and honest with each other without causing offence or feeling that changing ways of working is a negative reflection of the existing processes.

It is important that a business has clear goals and objectives for operational excellence, and that it understands where it is on its journey towards achieving them. It is equally important that these goals consider the needs of the customer to ensure that their requirements are met.

Performance against these targets should be easy to see across a site. Dashboards, performance metrics and visual management are an integral part of performance management.

Customer requirements should be communicated to the whole team in the form of clear daily targets, and feedback mechanisms implemented to ensure potential issues are escalated quickly. Teams are actively encouraged to communicate issues which could interfere with the completion of their daily tasks.

Brilliant processes are dependent on excellent problem solving. Our aim is to always find the root cause of an issue and from this, identify sustainable corrective actions which we implement in a timely manner.

Lean Six Sigma is a powerful problem-solving methodology which uses facts and data to identify root cause(s).

Rigorous problem solving with our customers is a fundamental requirement for building strong partnerships.

Data, in the right format and provided in real time, allows us to make informed decisions. Generating timely information in an easily understandable format allows us to be more proactive and prevent issues before they occur.

Our operational excellence team works in collaboration with our data team to gain knowledge and insights from data. Six Sigma provides some key tools which can be used to analyse data and gain powerful insights into how to optimise processes.  A clear data strategy is key to leveraging data effectively, driving innovation and growth.

Through delivering a series of training sessions in Lean Six Sigma, accompanied with coaching and an allocated sponsor, our employees can develop their skill sets with an internationally recognised business improvement qualification which they will use throughout their career.

Our internal operational excellence program runs in parallel with our employee learning and development plans. Sterling aims to support our people through further education and qualifications, encouraging memberships to industry bodies, to support their continuous professional development and keeping up to date with industry trends. This is vital to maintain a culture that makes our people feel motivated and enthusiastic about the possibilities and benefits that improvement can bring across the organisation and to our customers.

Sterling’s culture supports continuous improvement and our desire to build long standing customer partnerships. We have over 50 years’ experience in contract development and manufacturing, and over 1,300 employees globally. Our culture means that our employees have the confidence and ability to effectively identify, implement and work towards improvements in a sustainable way.

This means developing a safe environment where employees feel empowered and are able to share their thoughts and act upon them for the good of our customers and their own development.

Ensuring that objectives are clearly identified and aligned with our customers goals allows us to become a more integrated part of their team, enabling usto work in true partnership to achieve their project goals.

Our priority is to make our customers’ lives easier, and this includes the removal of non-value adding activities from our customer’s viewpoint. Both Sterling’s and the customer’s processes should be as simple as possible, to create the most efficiency.

Not only is it important to focus on collaboration with our customers, but it is equally as important to ensure we foster partnerships with our suppliers to further drive value for our customers. For example, assuring quality and consistency of materials to reduce risk.

Similarly, collaborating across functions and our global facilities is vital when working to benefit our customers. It is essential that our sites’ processes are aligned and that there is regular communication between them to ensure we all work towards a common goal. Through regular cross-functional and cross-site meetings, often involving our customers, we avoid working in silos. This is necessary to ensure that best practices are shared, opportunities for process improvements are realised and our customers’ requirements are not only met but exceeded.

At Sterling, we recognise that there is no beginning and no end when in pursuit of operational excellence, it is not just about achieving short term gains, but is about creating sustainable value and long term success. It is an ever-evolving journey and there are always new opportunities to develop, optimise and improve performance.

As we continue to grow, acquire new facilities, and onboard new experts, there is always the opportunity to learn and continuously improve our processes to benefit both our customers and our people.