Journey to Operational Excellence Program

The Discipline of Operations Management

The evidence of our practice and experience is overwhelming, the key to improving the productivity, quality and service levels of an organisation is to develop, in depth, the discipline of service Operations Management.

Historically this has been difficult to do for service organisations for at least four reasons.

Firstly the discipline itself, due mainly to its roots in engineering, developed a form of snobbery at the

professional, practitioner and academic levels.

This manifested itself in service organisations and service managers being treated as 2nd and 3rd class entities due to the lack of hard product focus.

Secondly, managers in service organisations found that traditional Operations professionals had no empathy or indeed understanding of the different challenges that come from the intangibility and complexity that service organisations are faced with.

Thirdly, the traditional Operations management frameworks and toolsets have been heavily product focused and failed to take into account the needs of service organisations.

Fourthly, service professionals and in particular knowledge workers, adopted a form of their own professional snobbery, ignoring the industrial and manufacturing sectors as sources of expertise and know-how, taking the view that such “hard” industries are alien to the complex and agile world of the service sectors.

Fortunately this is no longer the case and Service Operations Management, although still in its relative infancy, has become a respected and highly regarded branch of management in its own right.

For many service organisations and managers however, the legacy of alienation has been hard to overcome.

Those service organisations and managers who have embraced the Service Operations Management discipline however, have been rewarded with the same dramatic improvements in productivity, quality and service levels that their cousins in traditional manufacturing have enjoyed for the last 50 years.

At McLaw we use the terms “Operations” and “Execution” interchangeably to emphasize that the historical narrow view of traditional Operations management, with its roots in manufacturing, no longer applies.

Today the discipline of Operations Management is a key requirement in all areas of the business  and our program will embed this competence in your organisation from front line managers up to and including the Senior Management Team.

Operational Excellence - full paper