Want your improvement program to take root? Everyone does,but not everyone is successful. The difference is in the foundational principles in which the improvement program is planted.
OpX Home
Welcome to Operational Excellence (OpX), home of relentless performance improvement.
OpX is both a way of thinking and a set of technologies. The aim of is improving your competitive position by helping you do, what you do, better than anyone else.
Think Toyota. Not the flashiest cars, not fastest cars, not even the most fuel efficient cars. So what has driven Toyota’s success over the last 50 years? Know-how. Toyota knows how to build and deliver cars and knows how to do this as well or better than anybody else.
That’s what OpX boils down to – know-how. Not academic know-how, but the know-how that comes from blending theory and practice and embedding it into the products, processes and programs of the business. This is knowledge that is part of the corporate DNA – of the way the work gets done. It is know-how that has been operationalized.
The Technologies of OpX
Organizations are in the midst of a quality revolution — again, or perhaps still. The new wave of technologies includes Lean & Lean Six Sigma, Quality Function Deployment, Performance Measurement & SPC, Evolutionary Operations and Policy Deployment. These are not untested, academic notions of what should work. These are the core technologies that are redefining the way works gets done and producing unprecedented results for organizations like Toyota and Hewlett-Packard. 
Lean, for example, represents the know-how Toyota has accumulated over the past 60 years in its efforts to continuously improve product quality, delivery and cost. The effectiveness of these efforts has been demonstrated time and again, through Toyota’s efforts at extending the lessons it has learned globally and through the actions of others that have studied and adapted these methods to their own purposes.
These then, are evidenced-based practices that emphasize the application of proven, scientific methods and rigor to the task of improving effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility in the messy, real world of organizations.
OpX is performance improvement without excuses – using these best practices to improve process, product and program performance. <Read more on OpX Technologies>
The Thinking Behind OpX
The first thing to understand about the thinking behind OpX is that it is not concerned with just the operations group. It is concerned with the operations of any functional area or the entire enterprise. The technologies and thinking behind OpX, therefore, are equally applicable to improving the performance of the human resources function, the accounting or IT group as well as the operations division and is equally applicable to in the manufacturing, service, public and not for profit sectors.
Why? Because OpX is concerned with the way the work gets done. We all have work to do. Finance processes transactions, prepares statements and secures low cost sources of financing expansion. Human resources is busy hiring new talent, building effective compensation, retention and performance management programs. Operations is delivering products and services to customers, marketing is detailing new product design and IT is trying to keep track of it all.
OpX is all about doing any and all of these jobs faster, with less waste, greater quality and lower cost. That’s the key to OpX thinking, recognizing that all the work that happens in an organization, from accounting to operations and from assembly to strategic planning, happens as a result of a process. Systems and processes are the verbs of work. Nothing gets done without them. OpX demands that we understand the organization as a system, just as Dr. Edwards Deming taught us over 50 years ago. <Read more on OpX Thinking>
