Operational Excellence in Service Industries
Lean Operational Excellence (LOpEx) for Non-Manufacturing Environments
MCP are specialists in supporting manufacturing companies through Operational Excellence programmes, whether they want to improve reliability, productivity or benchmark themselves within their industry.
But what if you are in a service industry?
In our experience, service industry organisations face the same challenges as manufacturers. They want to improve response times, lower costs and increase productivity. At the same time, they want to improve quality and customer satisfaction.
Whilst much effort is focused on applying improvement programmes within manufacturing environments, the same process can be applied to improving the efficiency of service and administrative operations.
A Holistic Approach
Lean Operational Excellence (LOpEx) is a holistic approach to eliminating inefficiencies in processes in service and administrative operations within non-manufacturing businesses.
Building upon the proven techniques of lean manufacturing, Lean Operational Excellence looks to improve the flow of your information, the speed of execution and reduce the level of errors. The potential for improving efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction within office and service environments is vast.
LOpEx is an MCP programme which delivers rapid and sustainable improvements in Cost, Quality, and Performance through a simple 3 stage process:
LOpEx Implementation Tools
The implementation of a LOpEx programme, using the tools of six sigma and lean administration, can include:
Re-designing processes to reduce process steps.
Visual management to control work flow.
Office layout and organisation.
Levelling of work load.
LOpEx is simply about creating more value for customers by eliminating activities that are considered waste. It has been developed to deliver benefits in less than three months and can be used in any service or administrative environment, such as sales offices, call centres, banks, insurance companies etc.
LOpEx in Action
How LOpEx brought a 75% reduction in order lead time through order processing Improvements
The Background
The management team of a brand leading furniture manufacturer with a turnover of £30 million p.a. was concerned that whilst operating efficiencies in the factory had given the business the ability to produce a product within 4 days, it was still taking six weeks from customer order to delivery.
The Project
MCP worked with a cross section of employees from the sales, marketing and planning departments, from shop floor through to senior management. The first step was to run improvement workshops with groups of administration and support staff to demonstrate that improvements could be made to their processes.
The second step involved mapping the existing processes to identify bottlenecks, non-value adding steps and unnecessary processes.
Having successfully implemented improvements in the order intake and planning processes, the on-site team moved into other administrative areas and improved processes including purchase order processing and expenses.
Key wins
Order intake process reduced by 14 steps, a reduction of 80%.
Planning process re-defined and simplified reducing it by 68%.
Order lead time reduced from 6 weeks to just 10 days.
Words from our client:
“I never believed that “manufacturing type” productivity improvements could be applied to a sales and marketing arena. However, MCP demonstrated, so graphically, the wasted time and effort in our current processes. I shall now always be looking for efficiency improvements from my team.”
Marketing Director
eBook - First Steps to Operational Excellence
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