How three organizations are driving operational excellence

With most businesses now aware of operational excellence and the benefits it brings, many are actively considering how they can drive it in their own organizations. In this article, we look at three organizations that have taken steps to overhaul their organizational processes and ways of working in the quest for operational excellence.

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Simplifying operations at Unilever

In January 2022, Unilever announced significant changes to its organizational structure with the goal of becoming a simpler, more category focused business. Moving away from its traditional matrix structure, the business separated itself into five distinct groups, which were beauty and wellbeing, personal care, home care, nutrition and ice cream.

Alan Jope, CEO at Unilever, explained: “Our new organizational model has been developed over the last year and is designed to continue the step-up we are seeing in the performance of our business. Moving to five category-focused business groups will enable us to be more responsive to consumer and channel trends, with crystal-clear accountability for delivery. Growth remains our top priority and these changes will underpin our pursuit of this.”

Each of these groups are supported by the centralized Unilever business operations department which has the job of providing the technology, systems and processes to drive operational excellence. This new model for the organization was accompanied by a number of staff changes, with a 15 percent reduction in senior management roles and a five percent increase in junior management roles, resulting in the adjustment of 1,500 roles globally.

Streamlining processes at the University of Illinois

Following the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic when the University of Illinois was forced to begin teaching remotely, the university realized that it had a significant capacity to innovate and that it could do so with a high level of agility. This prompted the university to begin considering how it could rethink the way that it operated.

The determined goal was to maximize the impact of the organizational missions through operational excellence. The strategy for achieving this was to reduce duplicated work, streamline processes and realize possible cost savings.

One method employed was to develop dedicated support teams and strategic partners for individual business units such as finance or human resources. The university also set out to develop centers of excellence with defined goals that included defining functional, unit-specific strategies and developing, interpreting and implementing policies for these units across the business.

The predicted impact was that collaborative partnerships would be formed across the business and with processes being streamlined cost savings would be redirected to strategic priorities.

Uniper’s vision for operational excellence

Uniper, a global energy supplier serving Europe and the US, has developed a new vision for the company’s overall operational excellence strategy. The new template for operational excellence initiatives follows a three-step process:

• The creation of impact: This first step will see operational excellence teams experimenting with different implementation approaches to determine what will work best.
• Development of capabilities: The second step involves the internal development of new, holistic training materials that will be distributed to teams in light of what approaches have been identified as beneficial in the first step.
• The journey of cultural change: The final step is focused on integrating operational excellence and new ways of working into company culture to enable continuous improvement. This includes designing sustainability into operational excellence programs from the beginning and ensuring that employees understand what their part in the value chain is.

Other aspects being driven by the new operational excellence program include the use of established behavior metrics as part of a change management initiative and ensuring that structured problem-solving mechanisms are embedded into core processes.

Has your business taken similar steps to drive operational excellence? Let us know in the comments below.