2nd Building Block of a Stable and Capable Delivery System | Operational Excellence Quick Hits
Quick Hits share weekly tips and techniques on topics related to Operational Excellence. This week’s theme relates to Operational Excellence Operating Structure Part 5: Employee Involvement & Teamwork. We hope you enjoy the information presented!


Speaker 1: (00:04)
In the last session, we talked about the first building block of developing a stable and capable delivery system. In that building block, we talked about synchronous flow and how to synchronize the operations to customer demand. The next building block above that is employee involvement and teamwork. Once you create synchronous flow in the organization, you will expose hidden capacities. So most resources have excess capacity or protective capacity. Now we need to leverage that protective capacity. If we use the employees knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience, and leverage that, we can really start to drive improvement in the organization. Synchronous flow will give us a breakthrough improvement in performance. Employee involvement and teamwork will give us the next breakthrough in improvement, moving towards a stable and capable delivery system. So it’s leadership’s role to really understand, when you have this protective capacity, how you’re going to leverage that within the organization.
Speaker 1: (01:19)
So first, we want to understand how we can take the skills of the employees and flex them within the organization to improve the overall performance. Second, is leadership needs to identify opportunities for the employees to work on while they have available time. It’s important that we get the employees involved in the process of ongoing improvement, and to get their buy-in to start developing the processes to achieve breakthrough improvement.
Speaker 1: (01:59)
Every organization that we go into to help them improve their overall process by leveraging the knowledge of those employees brings big improvements to the process. I’m not talking just a few percentage. I’m talking, the processes can be improved 50, 80, 100% or more just by changing the way things are done, utilizing the employees ideas, implementing those ideas to drive even more improvement towards that stable and capable delivery system.