What is Process Excellence?

Every single business process is important. That is why your business can only reach its optimum potential when every process in your business is as effective and as efficient as it possibly can. Hence why process improvement to achieve process excellence is critical when it comes to gaining the advantage you need over other businesses. Progress comes from improved processes.

The Difference between PEX, OpEX and Business Excellence

If you asked a hundred people what the difference between Process, Operational, and Business Excellence is, you will absolutely get a hundred different answers. The three terms are not the same, however, they are frequently misused, one for any other. But the reality is, Process, Operational and Business Excellence form a hierarchy that starts with Process Excellence as a subset of Operational Excellence, and itself as a subset of Business Excellence.

Process Excellence (PEX)

Process Excellence is basically concerned with the process itself. It consists of making processes more efficient and effective through design and thorough testing. The main goal of process excellence is to deliver consistent, positive outcomes but with minimal variation i.e. what Six Sigma tackles and waste i.e. what Lean deals with. Usually, Process and Operational Excellence are frequently used interchangeably. This however, is not wholly accurate.

Operational Excellence (OpEX)

Operational Excellence is a broader concept compared to Process Excellence. Process excellence is concerned with process. On the other hand, operational and transactional environments have more included within them than just processes.

Operational Excellence comprises not only processes throughout the organization, but it also brings with it several other ingredients such as; notably culture and how the organization is perceived from a value creation perspective. There are several components of Operational Excellence mix and they include; how people, technology, tools and other resources combine and interact with each other as well as your processes.

Side Note: OPEX denotes Operational Expense, OpEX accounts for Operational Excellence.

Business Excellence

Business Excellence includes both PEX and OPEX and its main objective is the achievement of results. Business Excellence also includes overall business strategy, investor, customer, partner, and stakeholder communication, and overall development of the organization into the future like adopting automated food packaging systems to make the work easy and effective.

The Process by itself is not a guarantee of success, since you may have excellent processes in situ. But, they may be directing you in the wrong direction. Furthermore, if the business strategy is weak or wrong, then efficient and effective processes may be a disadvantage to your business that much faster. Business Excellence more often than not requires a holistic outlook of the whole organization. It is all set within the overriding context of delivering results.

Summary

Process Excellence (PEX) is basically creating efficient and effective processes that are able to deliver consistent output with as little variation and waste as possible.

Operational Excellence (OPEX) refers to plus culture, people, resources, systems, and how they can all optimally work together to achieve a bigger goal. Business Excellence is pretty much focused on delivering overall results in a pragmatic and consistently successful means.

Importance of Process Improvement Process improvement is a means used to enable organizations to make small, incremental changes that in turn provide greater value in the long run. Your business can become even more effective and productive if you include just a few simple steps. A growing number of companies are changing the way they capture, share, and review their business processes. These companies make processes part of their organizations’ daily conversations at every level. They then aim to foster an environment of continual improvement. In this environment, the processes and their outcomes can easily be tracked, regularly reviewed, and updated.

Also, Check – 8 Reasons Why You Need a Business Coach

What are the Steps to Process Excellence?

The following are the steps to Process Excellence

1. Put your customer at the center of your decision

The Lean principle pretty much insists on you putting all of your resources into what adds more value to your customers and to disregard anything that does not contribute to that. From this idea, books, training programs, and business plans have been built around figuring out what is the best suitable decision for your business and what is not. Having a dialogue with customers will enable you to find out what it is they like about your business so far. This should help you address the critical points of your business without affecting what the customers love about your company.

2. Always know what it is you are doing

You are supposed to always be knowledgeable of what happens within your business at all times since its important to have business knowledge . Issues on the supply chain, down to how your invoices get paid are all supposed to be at your fingertips. Eliminating waste from your company’s system offers you more efficiency in return. You should give more tasks to that team that works much faster. This will save you a lot of time in the long run. Process mining is a good technique to help you in identifying efficiencies across the organization that may greatly impact the roles that people take on, the technology that you have applied as well as the structure of your organization. Process mining will enable you to identify the aspects in your business that are going well and help you perform even better at them, pass across the best business practices within your company as well as help you in knowing and striking better opportunities as they come up.

3. Change your old ways

If your desire is to gain Process Excellence, then you have to change what it is you were doing before. For your organization to change for the better, you have to be willing to give up the old ways of carrying out your organization’s activities. This is easier said than done but the following are a few points that will help you:

• Have in mind exactly what it is you want to achieve
• Have a clear perspective what the journey looks like
• Break the long journey into small manageable bits
• Monitor progress at every stage so that you can be sure of where you are slowing down, or not making progress as you should be
• Be persistent and consistent always!

4. Take up your role as a Leader

Find out what it is that motivates people, especially those that work for you or with you. Once you have that information, use it get the results that you desire. Knowing what motivates the people that are on your team is important because different people are motivated be different things. Some are motivated by money and others by more free time. According to research, among the most effective techniques to motivate employees is engaging them in the decision making processes.

5. Keep up with Tech

Currently in the Tech industry, artificial intelligence in conjunction with bots is becoming a powerful combination. If you look hard enough and conduct extensive research, you will definitely find a technology solution to many of your business problems. Another bonus to technology is that it is getting more and more accessible and affordable to you and your organization. Being aware of the latest tech developments will help you to understand what new ideas are worth adopting and best suited for your organization.