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Prologue

I remember the day that changed my professional life forever: the day I learned things that altered my view of continuous improvement; the day I saw a business that had harnessed its efforts not only to get better each day but also to improve business growth and performance; the day I learned that a company that achieves Operational Excellence is much more than an organization that eliminates waste and does things efficiently—it is a company that has developed and applied fundamental principles for sustained business growth.

It was quite a day.

On that day, I heard Operational Excellence defined in a way that was easy to understand, applicable to all levels of an organization, and effective at aligning everyone not toward a vision, but toward a destination. I also had the privilege of seeing the definition come to life when I walked through an office and saw Operational Excellence in action.

Don’t get me wrong—I am not a newcomer to all of this. I was previously well read in continuous improvement and was striving to create a culture of continuous improvement at my company. I specialized in business processes and improving office functions. I had used my knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, and the successful Toyota Production System to make improvements in my company’s business processes recently and thought I knew how to effectively use the latest tools and techniques.

But, I was wrong. Sure, the tools worked, and by applying them, I was making progress. The journey seemed endless, though, week after week finding areas to improve and applying tools, with no destination in sight. I realized on that fateful day that anything we do to try to improve our business processes in the office must be geared toward supporting business growth. It not only has to drive bottom-line results; it has to lay a foundation from which we can grow our business.

As if that was not enough of a game changer, I was shocked to learn that companies achieve Operational Excellence in months, not years. And, it does not require a strong leader to drive the change and sustain it. It takes education, and boy did I get some. I discovered that Operational Excellence is not a vague or ambiguous place but rather a tangible destination that can be achieved by following a road map. Most important, because Operational Excellence is achieved through a process, it can be taught, which means the knowledge can be shared and applied quickly throughout the entire organization.

Even though I did not get all the details when I learned about Operational Excellence for the first time, the knowledge was simple and intuitive. I understood enough to be able to go back and begin educating people in my own office, including my boss, about the concepts. To think there was a time when I had never heard of takt capability, workflow cycles, guaranteed turnaround times, single-point initialization, standard work at the flow level, and an office that operates without management…

But, I am getting ahead of myself. The real story begins a few days earlier, when I returned from a weeklong conference. While I was gone, something had gone seriously wrong at my office.