Across the few operations and shop floors I have been fortunate to visit, I have observed a recurring theme: Operations staff skepticism towards transformation programs. Let’s face it, these efforts have a bad reputation and quite often deservingly so. Internal or external practitioners/consultants come into an organization, ask a lot of questions, distribute templates and actions, and a few weeks or months later, present their findings to executives while the people who actually have been doing the work, have raised issues and offered suggestions, are left out of the conversation altogether. Sounds familiar?
A few years ago, one such effort set its eyes on my team. A team of consultants was given data from the ERP system, analyzed it, presented it to executives, and when these senior leaders asked about what they were looking at, the team realized that they couldn’t make sense of it without reaching out to us, the operations team. We spent several weeks, across many meetings, explaining rather painfully to the “data expert” that the extract couldn’t be used as is. It had to be crosschecked with other datasets and cleaned so that it could be useable for forecasting. We had reported the poor data issue to management multiple times, provided options to relevant teams to no avail, and here we were reviewing the same issue with a new external party, while we had deadlines to meet and stakeholders to manage.
In another instance, a premier transformation team came in with an executive mandate, asked to review our engagement model with a strategic supplier. We walked through the details of our preparation work, engagement model, and reporting system. They left with our work output and, I have to give them credit for that, actually went back to management and said that they didn’t see a path to add value given the context the firm was operating under.
These are not isolated experiences. I am confident that many of my colleagues share similar stories. They reflect a structural problem in how operational improvement is designed and deployed. So when I read about operational improvement strategic updates, reports and other guidance, I genuinely feel ambivalent and can relate to the lack of patience of operations teams who are already going through scope increase, mergers, acquisitions, new product launch and all other revenue or strategic actions that they must execute while keeping the business running.
The question is not whether to bring in external support. It is whether that support comes in to extract and advise or to embed, translate, and build. The first model has a deservedly bad reputation. The second one is rarer and more valuable.
On operational improvement efforts for the purpose of achieving greater EBITDA, be it using group technology principles, embedding operational technology, running Lean events or any other strategy – Executives can do Gemba walks themselves, act on feedback from their teams and examine the suitability of the key performance indicators they use to lead their organizations.
The IE toolbox is effective when it captures, as a baseline, the operational team’s working model against the constraints they operate under. It is the academic translation of operational reality that managers, auditors and investors can comprehend and trust.
A controversial take, IT and OT implementations do not yield transformative outcomes. They provide the visibility and clarity of existing operations to teams, allowing them to articulate the impact of their chosen process improvement paths. OT attempts to capture consistently what experienced operators know intuitively, and the aim of these technologies is to make the signal persistent, transferable, and defensible. The knowledge was always there. It is given a form that can be read.
A few recommendations:
Examine your own management style and metrics to assess whether they are producing the intended results and behaviors from your team — and whether they tie to your P&L objectives.
Run the transformation program with your immediate staff first to uncover inefficiencies and contradicting goals in your management by objectives design. These flow down into the organization and change design objectives frequently clash against the written goals already embedded across every level. Nobody surfaces the conflict, especially if this may impact their compensation.
Incentivize your operations teams to offer suggestions for improvement. Rewarding them for their effort to do more with their existing resources may yield a better outcome than hiring external teams.
As a PE running an industrial portfolio or as an operator and/or manufacturer, how do you approach operational improvement projects and which path, internal or external resources, has proven more effective?
Marième Doukoure-Amoa is an industrial engineer, the founder of Senvoice, a venture focused on value chains in advanced manufacturing and powder metallurgy. She writes on the intersection of operational strategy, industrial systems, and emerging manufacturing technologies.
The ideas and arguments in this article are my own. AI was used to assist with drafting and editing.
Part of a series on operational strategy and manufacturing systems.
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