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Building Operational Excellence

The Practices That Set Leaders Apart  

Ella Haapiainen
Ella Haapiainen
September 23, 2025
6 minutes
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Rising costs, shifting customer expectations, and rapid digital transformation demand organizations adapt quickly while delivering consistent quality and value. Operational Excellence (OpEx) is how leaders keep up.  

The value of OpEx is both the promotion of consistent learning and improvement and ensuring changes align with the company’s strategic objectives. OpEx is about building engagement throughout the business to drive performance. Without this, operational improvement will not be sustainable. 

When OpEx is baked into the business, leaders unlock several benefits including:  

  • Aligning the business to the strategic goals and driving change in performance 
  • Engaging the whole organization to understand their role in delivering the business strategy 
  • Increasing bottom line benefits through incremental improvements in efficiency and cost reduction 
  • Creating the structures to drive improvement by engaging the workforce to design the system and empowering them to own the solution 
  • Encouraging a learning culture where employees are equipped with the tools and techniques to identify and solve problems 
  • Developing a visual organization and creating a culture of continuous improvement  

Here are six best practices for obtaining OpEx that companies must incorporate into daily operations to build the foundations of resilience, innovation, and long-term success. 

Standardize for Success

Standards define how work gets done. These standards ensure processes are conducted efficiently, accurately, and consistently across different teams and departments. Operational standards cover everything from safety to customer experience. 

 

Measure What Matters

Business guru and author Peter Drucker said: "If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it."

Once a company develops the operational standards, they can use them to inform the metrics and KPIs for tracking. This will help to measure if the standards are met and ensure the business is collecting the data to inform the ongoing strategy. This also helps to identify any areas for improvement or potential problems that need addressing. 

Make Improvement a Habit

Think of it this way – achieving OpEx is the end game, but continuous improvement (CI) is how companies get there. CI requires cultural support. Without a culture of empowerment, learning, and engagement, CI initiatives may stall or lack impact. 

"Culture is the key to Operational Discipline and hence Operational Excellence. Values and principles underpin mindsets and behaviors… To change culture, mindsets and behaviors have to change."

For example, Milliken, a privately held global manufacturer based in the U.S., emphasizes that true OpEx is rooted in culture. Adding that leaders invest in training to move mindsets from firefighting to proactive, zero-loss thinking. This cultural shift empowers employees to collaborate on lasting CI. 

Make Problem Solving Second Nature

Great organizations make problem solving instinctive often using a spot, analyze, fix approach. Another common technique is root cause analysis, which involves breaking down a problem into its component parts to identify what caused it in the first place, giving more data for developing a solution. Data is key to effective problem solving, as it allows the organization to make faster and more reliable decisions. 

Future-Proof Your Workforce

Investing in employee training and development is a key factor in achieving OpEx. It helps ensure your employees are well-equipped to conduct their roles efficiently, accurately, and consistently. Moreover, providing comprehensive training programs helps retain top talent by creating an environment where employees feel valued and appreciated. 

Digitize to Optimize

Waste isn’t just costly – it slows decision-making and creates risk. Automation tackles both by streamlining workflows, cutting unnecessary steps, and boosting accuracy. With the right technologies in place, repetitive and manual tasks like data entry to approvals are removed or consolidated, freeing teams to focus on value-added work.

The result? Faster decisions, lower error rates, and a more resilient business process end to end

Turning Practice into Performance

Dave Waters, supply chain and AI expert once said, "If a company isn’t continuously improving then it is slowly dying." OpEx isn't just a tool, it’s about building engaged teams and driving systemic change through culture and data. The path to OpEx requires commitment, focus, and the willingness to adapt. By applying these best practices, organizations can build a framework for growth that is scalable, sustainable, and future-ready. The companies that commit to this journey will not only sharpen their competitive edge today but also build the resilience to thrive in tomorrow’s marketplace. 

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Meet the experts behind the article.
Ella Haapiainen
Ella Haapiainen
Global Consulting Head Digital Implementation