During my time as a consultant and later in my professional life, I had the privilege of getting to know some companies, their strategies, operational approaches and cultures. For many, the topic of Operational Excellence led a shadowy existence. CIP managers, mostly young graduates, enthusiastically tried to bring the "teaching" of lean processes into the companies. Some initiatives, so-called OpEx programs, usually failed due to a lack of understanding by senior management personnel of how important these programs actually are for your company in the long-term overall context.
OpEx - From corporate culture to decarbonization
While in the heyday of LEAN management programs, after Porsche's success story, the focus was mainly on achieving efficiency gains and quality improvements, in my opinion, the potential of an organization geared towards operational excellence, e.g. in the reduction of CO2 emissions and thus in the achievement of decarbonization goals, was strongly ignored for a long time.
Two real world examples
1. A customer had a massive quality problem with one of their components for over a year. In some cases 80% of their components were faulty. For this reason, after customer complaints, all components had to go through an additional 100% inspection for months. Due to the management's focus on the introduction of operational excellence, the core causes were identified and eliminated by an interdisciplinary team within the framework of structured problem solving.
2. Due to the lack of feedback loops in the context of structured shop floor management (development, production, logistics, quality, etc.), an incorrectly developed tool was recommissioned as a follow-up tool with exactly the same flaws. The problems consisted of the risk of continuous production interruptions, resulting in increased cleaning effort of the tool and thus increased start-up-scrap over the entire life cycle.
Effects of Operational Excellence on CO2-Reduction
This are only two examples, but if you now look at the corporate effects of Operational Excellence on the entire supply chain in terms of CO2 emissions, the levers for reducing these emissions quickly become clear: Delivery of additional raw material from overseas (ship, truck, etc.), return shipments of NOK-components, provision of additional space for storage, assembly, quality controls, additional shifts, personnel and machine capacities... the list goes on and on.
As you can see, the levers of Operational Excellence from development to production across all business processes are manifold and should go hand in hand as part of a decarbonization strategy. Existing Operational Excellence Programs or an established shop floor management should be linked to decarbonization strategies as required, as both do not contradict but rather potentiate each other.
What decarbonization strategies do you have and have you already linked them to your Operational Excellence efforts?
I am looking forward to an exchange,
Moritz Hirscher
