People – A Key to Operational Excellence

Operational excellence is a team sport. Achieving operational excellence involves every person at every level of the organization because every role is doing something that brings value to the customer and is therefore on the critical path to success. We can see this at work in the Ten Guiding Principles of the Shingo Model.

1. Respect for Every Individual – create development plans for employees that include appropriate goals, when they involve employees in continuous improvement, and when they provide consistent coaching for problem-solving.
2. Lead with Humility – have a consistent, foreseeable engagement in the workplace. Employees know that they can point out opportunities for improvement and expect gratitude. Not repercussions.
3. Seek Perfection – look for long-term, sustainable solutions rather than temporary fixes. Recognize that simplicity is the key to processes that trend toward the ideal and allows for everyone to succeed.
4. Embrace Scientific Thinking – enable everyone to follow a structure for solving problems and allow for ideas to be tested without the fear of failure.
5. Focus on Process – get to the root cause of what created the error and improve it. Engage employees to collaborate with managers in driving a better process. Make sure that all resources including information, materials, parts, and equipment meet the standards before they are used in a process.
6. Assure Quality at the Source – organize your work environment so that potential problems become visible immediately at the source. Individuals are critical to ensure that when something does go wrong, the process is stopped and corrected before the error moves further down the line.
7. Flow & Pull Value – avoid creating or storing more product or services than are immediately required based on customer demand. This requires employees to make informed decisions and to be empowered to take action at the source.
8. Think Systemically – remove any barriers that prevent ideas, information, materials, or ideas from flowing from people throughout the organization.
9. Create Consistency of Purpose – clearly communicate the mission and direction with everyone. Set individual and team goals that are well aligned with the overall strategy and goals.
10. Create Value for the Customer – continuously work to gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs and expectations. Ensure employees are tuned into the needs of customers and can make the right decision to create value.

At Rever, we help put the frontline worker at the center of operational excellence. We believe the frontline is an untapped resource for many companies and that by activating this resource they will be able to create tremendous value for their company, and their employees. In our latest release, we continue to empower the frontline employee to contribute to operational excellence by:

• Building virtual teams based on employee skills
• Enabling employees to execute a variety of pre-configured processes
• Recognizing individual contributors and teams with ‘points’
• Proactively notify employees
• Enable everyone, everywhere with a mobile app

Contact us here to learn more about how Rever can help you activate the untapped power of your frontline.