Operational excellence is a business principle which is currently supported by a range of process management tools and methodologies, however, these approaches fail to utilize the most valuable resource at the disposal of all large organizations – their employees. This audience is already delivering results across a huge range of use cases, from disruptive innovation to new product development, so why is it currently being overlooked by leaders looking to augment their operational excellence strategy? Qmarkets’ SVP Global Solutions, Michael Stilger, went to Business Performance Excellence in San Francisco earlier this year to try and gain a better understanding of this issue…
In September 2016, Qmarkets’ team once again made the trip to California for another flagship industry event – Business Process Excellence USA 2016. Taking place at the Fisherman’s Wharf Hyatt, in “The Paris of the West” (San Francisco), this year’s event brought together leaders from a range of industries and backgrounds.
As this was the first time Qmarkets had participated in a process excellence focused event, it was important for the team to take advantage of this opportunity and meet as many new faces as possible. As you might expect, Michael was especially busy in San Francisco.
As a recognized thought leader on innovation, he was selected to moderate a unique “Innovation Ideas Session”. This 50 minute session allowed professionals from Keybank, RWE Energy, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Anthem Healthcare to share their vision for an innovative strategy, process, or idea. There was only one rule – no PowerPoint. It was Michael’s responsibility to facilitate this session, ensuring that all ideas were fully realized, and that the audience’s questions were full answered.
Alongside this, Michael was also invited to moderate the innovation track of sessions on day 1 of this event, and to host the cocktail reception on that same evening. However, when Michael wasn’t busy with his leadership responsibilities, he found time to participate in a short interview on the intersection between innovation and operational excellence strategy. Take a look at the video below to see the interview in full, or read the paraphrased transcription below.
In your opinion, what is the difference between process excellence and operational excellence?
The difference between process excellence and organisational excellence is really all in the name, for process excellence you focus on the process; you optimise processes. Whatever resource or process there is you can squeeze the last little bit of optimisation out. On the other hand, organisational excellence has more to do with people, with an excellent leadership, and especially with innovation. You bring in the element of innovation, which then rolls out as a discipline across the whole organisation.
While process excellence is more focused on the actual process and processes, organisational excellence is combined with innovation and strong leadership across the whole organisation.
How has the landscape of process excellence changed? What can we expect from the next generation of process excellence?
The next generation of process excellence will definitely bring in more elements from the world of crowdsourcing. Including more intelligence from all the various areas of the business. It’s not just the guys that hold Six Sigma or Kaizen accreditation that should be contributing, it’s everyone. In the future it will include all employees, customers, partners, the supply chain and even competitors. By bringing all of these stakeholders together and getting inspiration for process and business performance excellence from all these areas, it will literally lift your organisation up onto another level.
How are Qmarkets enabling companies to achieve sustainable performance improvement?
Qmarkets is an innovation management software vendor, and we have a suite of products that help companies to measure innovation; and innovation could be measured through process innovation or it could be disruptive innovation, it could be open innovation, so there are so many tools around that. But specifically for business performance excellence, we are focusing on tools that help you to streamline the processes and include your crowd, your employees, first and foremost, but also the other people around the organisation in that whole business performance journey. So you take them on a journey, but in a very structured way, using a set of tools to do so.
What would be your top three key points to consider when developing an innovation strategy?
Firstly you have to look what you want to achieve as an organization. What does innovation mean for you, and what do you want to achieve: do you want to focus on disruptive innovation, process innovation, or open innovation. Do you want to focus on all disciplines together, or pick them separately? To have a clear vision for innovation, and then to establish a discipline of innovation, a strategy for innovation, and then to tie it all together you need a tool which can establish a culture of innovation.
But it’s not a sequential process; it’s a parallel process where you foster a culture of innovation which leads to a discipline of innovation. All of this process is carried by a strong and powerful tool such as Qmarkets.
What was your motivation for attending? Why did you or Qmarkets choose to sponsor Business Performance Excellence Summit?
We are here because we feel there is a good audience. There’s a very interesting mixture of leading people that have the capacity to speak on these topics. It’s quite an interesting step for us, because we are all about innovation, innovation, innovation, but that’s at least how people perceive us. So much about is actually about business performance excellence and process innovation. The main reason for us to be here is, that we show the world that we’re not only doing innovation but we’re also doing business performance excellence process innovation.
What is the value for Qmarkets in attending Business Performance Excellence Summit?
The value for us to be here is clearly to network and to widen our horizon on what others are looking in partnerships. We are looking for new customers, but especially we’re looking for strategic partnerships. We feel there are some really good partners here. We feel that there could be a lot of good strategic, important partnerships coming out of this for us.
Contact Qmarkets to consult with our experts on how your enterprise can formulate a productive operational excellence strategy, or click here to discover what leading analysts had to say about Qmarkets’ solution!