Operational excellence is like a well-coordinated orchestra — each part seamlessly works together to create a flawless performance.
It’s not easy to achieve this level of operational efficiency, but every year, more companies are trying. According to the 2024 PEX Network’s State of the Industry Report, 33% of respondents say they are building an operational excellence process base, up from 29% the previous year.
In addition to helping companies stand out in their industries, this focus on transforming and optimizing processes pays off with increased productivity and revenue.
“The better your operations, the more you can achieve with the same input at a lower cost,” says Jonathan Butler, Group Product Manager at Nintex.
“Productivity ties into this as well — if you’re more productive, you generate more revenue at a lower cost,” Butler says. “Essentially, operational excellence drives both productivity and profitability by aligning cost reductions and revenue growth.”
So what drives operational excellence, and how can you achieve it at your organization?
Why your organization should prioritize operational excellence
Operational excellence is one of those phrases that gets tossed around so often it starts to lose its meaning.
What exactly is it, and what does it look like in practice?
Operational excellence is a way to achieve consistently effective business practices through processes, resources, and technology. It involves creating a culture of continuous improvement to deliver increased value to your stakeholders and customers.
Here is what that might look like at your organization:
- A desire for an end-to-end transformation of workflows and value chains
If your teams are tired of “busy work” or duplicating efforts — and you’re tired of the resulting loss of resources and revenue — this type of transformation might be a huge driver for you.
A full-scale transformation on this front requires incorporating evolving technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and digitization — but it pays off.
When AI works for you, in concert with your existing systems, it’s truly a beautiful thing. Integrating AI into your workflows and processes helps organizations:
- Eliminate tedious or repetitive tasks
- Remove duplicate or unnecessary steps in a workflow to save time
- Ensure data accuracy to avoid costly mistakes
With AI on your side, it’s easier than ever to work toward the previously lofty goal of process excellence.
- The need to define new ways of working to support process efficiency
If your organization falls back on the mantra “We’ve always done it this way,” it may be time to encourage a mindset shift. Times are (always) changing, and companies can’t afford to lean on old ways of working and expect to stand out among their competitors.
As your company scales and expands, your teams may need to reimagine their workflows to reduce waste, improve productivity, or adapt to changing market conditions. This requires fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration, where teams feel empowered to challenge existing practices and adopt new technology and methods.
- The movement around input standardization and prediction
Asking less — and predicting more — is the modern approach to fulfilling your customers’ needs. This means you must ensure your data inputs across processes are consistent, structured, and reliable.
With the help of AI, you can analyze historical data and identify trends, outliers, and possible outcomes. Leveraging AI’s predictive capabilities helps with workload forecasting, hiring needs, and stock planning — another unlock for your organization as you pursue operational excellence.
“As you standardize operations, your quality should go up, and therefore the risks associated with poor quality or poor customer satisfaction should inherently go down,” Butler says.
- The internalization of a continuous improvement culture
Creating a true culture of continuous improvement requires a fundamental shift in mindset and behavior across your organization. This is no easy feat, especially when employees are used to traditional ways of working.
But it’s never too late to change culture for the better. This starts at the top, with executives leading by example, making employees owners of their processes, and encouraging and incentivizing them to continuously improve and update processes.
Three essential factors for successful operational excellence and business transformation
If your organization is set on achieving operational excellence, you’ll need to take a holistic approach at all levels of your business.
Here are the three foundational elements that work together to create a successful transformation, ensuring sustainable growth and a long-term competitive advantage:
1. Committed leadership
If you don’t have leadership on board, it will be tough to see any real change.
“Success really comes down to having executive sponsorship,” says Butler. “The most successful operational excellence initiatives are typically led by someone at the C-suite level, or at least a senior executive. Without top-level buy-in, it’s incredibly difficult to drive these efforts from the bottom up.”
Start by identifying someone in your organization who is a final decision-maker and who owns various processes and protocols in your company’s value chain. Then, involve them in the plan to start documenting and streamlining those processes.
For example, say your executive sponsor chooses a process management tool like Nintex. You can use AI tools to discover and document your existing processes and scale them fast with Nintex workflow automation. That means your teams have clear workflows to follow and can automate common tasks like document generation and routing, giving them back time to spend on more strategic activities.
But even with the best workflow automation tool, you still need your executive sponsor to continue to champion the tool. That way you ensure all team members understand and integrate it, so your organization can reach its operational potential.
2. Strategic business alignment
To get buy-in and resources, your executive sponsor needs to prove to the rest of the C-suite how impactful operational excellence can be. The best way to do this is to show how it directly relates to your company’s overarching vision and goals — whether that’s improving the customer experience, driving growth, or increasing profitability.
“I’d say the best initial focus is identifying where you can quickly show a return on investment (ROI) to leadership,” says Butler. “Even if it’s not solving a massive $90 million problem, tackling smaller $50,000 issues can add up. For example, if you solve three $50,000 problems in a month, you’ve saved $150,000. This success makes it easier to build momentum and justify tackling larger, more complex challenges.”
Instead of focusing on long-term projects, split your priorities. Dedicate a small portion of the team to addressing low-hanging fruit so you’ll get some immediate wins to prove value. Then, the rest of your team can focus on larger or more complex initiatives that will move the needle in a big way.
3. Technology adoption
Manual, repetitive tasks irritate employees and bog down teams. Plus, without automation, you run the risk of tasks being forgotten — especially when executing complex processes or workflows.
“Nintex Process Manager is our solution to that problem,” Butler says. “We work as a central process repository, and we integrate into tools like SharePoint. So if you also want to use SharePoint like your intranet, you can connect processes from Process Manager and embed them into SharePoint to make them more easily visible.”
Adopting tech like Nintex to automate, streamline, and optimize processes makes operational excellence possible to achieve and maintain. And thoughtful integration into existing systems ensures that you can continue to scale and extend your new solutions for future growth.
How Nintex accelerates operational excellence
If you’re looking to transform your business operations — or your current process management solution isn’t working for longer, more complex workflows — Nintex can help.
Here are two major ways Nintex Process Manager cuts a clear path to operational excellence:
- Identifying pain points
Maybe you know your org needs an operational change, but none of your processes are documented. That leaves with you feeling overwhelmed — and uncertain about what changes to tackle first.
It’s never too late to start. Nintex enables you to discover, identify, and document your processes quickly.
“If your processes are documented, you likely have a clear view of where most of your work-in-progress (WIP) bottlenecks are. This helps pinpoint the areas causing the most pain,” says Butler.
For example, once you document your workflows and processes, you might find that your sales reps have to log in to three different systems to document their outreach efforts, causing a bottleneck. By creating a single, consolidated form that syncs with all systems, you eliminate the issue.
- Enabling quick wins
Organizing and streamlining your processes doesn’t have to be a multi-quarter initiative. Nintex makes it easy to build and test automations quickly, so you can score quick wins.
“Tools like Nintex make it possible to quickly build and test automation solutions,” Butler says. “For example, you could gather employee feedback to identify frustrating tasks, such as using pen and paper to sign into the office. Automating this with near-field communication (NFC) technology could be implemented in a week, delivering immediate value without requiring months of work.”
Your journey to operational excellence starts with Nintex
By clarifying your processes and working toward continuous improvement, you create a level of operational excellence that becomes a true strategic differentiator at your organization.
With documented processes and more automation:
- Your employees deal with fewer tedious tasks and bottlenecks — often leading to increased job satisfaction
- Your customers appreciate that you deliver more value in less time
- Your executives see their ROI and other key metrics grow in alignment with company goals
To see how Nintex can help you transform processes at your organization, request a demo today.
