Luca Dellanna - Best Practices for Operational Excellence

It is very satisfying to observe an organization having achieved Operational Excellence. The managers are focused, working on the tasks where they have the most leverage; long are gone the days where they were running all over the place fixing emergencies. The workers are proud of their work, each owning his role and trusting his manager. The workplace is a good environment to work in: little dangers, everything is at its place, everyone knows what the company is doing and cares about it.

Unfortunately, Operational Excellence is being practiced in few companies only, for two reasons. First, few managers know how to achieve it. And second, most managers do not have it as their priority. While they are interested in the benefits of Operational Excellence, they are not convinced that such benefits are worth the efforts required to achieve them.

There are many selfish reasons to implement Operational Excellence. Managers of a team with a culture of Operational Excellence are less stressed (they do not spend their days running after emergencies), work less hours (when you are effective, you dont have to work overtime), are more fulfilled (they become respected by both their subordinates and their boss), are more valuable (they and their team become able to consistently hit milestones), are more employable (being able to manage a team effectively is a rare and valuable skill), and are richer (as their team hits their bottom line results, more money becomes available to be distributed in the form of bonuses).

Achieving Operational Excellence is not complex. It does take a limited amount of focused effort, but the benefits begin to show very fast, if you know what to focus on.

The first part of this book provides solutions to the problem: what to focus on. It will tell you which actions matter and which do not, so that you wont waste your time and energy on things which will not bring you any good. It will show you which are the few actions that, if taken, will have a disproportionate impact on your working life.

The second part of this book provides you with Eight Best Practices: quick tools you can begin using today to change the way your team operates and to get evidence that things can change: unmotivated employees can become motivated, unproductive ones can become productive, and previously unreachable objectives can be attained.

In the third and last part of this book, you will find a roadmap to extend the change to scopes larger than your direct subordinates. For example, your plant, your office or your organization.

Ive been working in the field of Operational Excellence for more than seven years and, while it might not seem much, Ive seen hundreds of companies and consulted dozens. Ive witnessed problems and solutions. I know what works and what doesnt. This book is the result: a practical guide to help you becoming a more effective manager and to solve most of your problems at work.

Operational Excellence is not an abstract concept which lives in the theories of academics. Operational Excellence is what happens on the work floor, on the production lines and in the warehouses. How employees work when they are actively supervised and when they arent. On the good days and, especially, on the bad ones, when everyone is tired or rushed.

Achieving Operational Excellence is not a complex endeavor. A few right actions applied with enough consistency are enough to turn a companys operations around in just a few months, as Ive witnessed with my own eyes in the companies I worked with. However, this is not easy. The difficulty in achieving Operational Excellence is not in the know-how required for it to happen, but in getting the time, systems and proactivity needed by the managers to transform the Four Principles of Operational Excellence into concrete actions that will change the way workers operate. This book will help you with this.

But first, let me begin with a story of change.

At the crossroad of the 17 th and the 18 th century, a French chemist by the name of leuthre Irne du Pont had to leave the country in a hurry. He had been a student of renowned chemist Lavoisier, but things recently changed. Due to political controversies following the French revolution, to escape jail and, perhaps, the guillotine, leuthre du Pont took a boat and sailed to the New Continent.

On the 1 st of January 1800, he landed in Delaware. Equipped with his chemical know-how, he began operating a gunpowder factory on the shores of the Brandywine River. As he would soon learn, gunpowder factories have an undesirable property: they tend to explode frequently.

Facing increased incidents, injuries and deaths, he decided something had to be done to reduce the explosions. How he solved the problem shaped the future of Operational Excellence.

leuthre du Pont took two initiatives . First, he required that the Director (himself) lived inside the factory with his family. He put his life on the line. If something blew up, he and his family might die in the process. Skin in the game.

Second, he established the rule that every new machinery had to be operated for the first time by members of top management. If the machine blew up, the manager would suffer the consequences on his own skin.

Needless to say, the safety of the plant increased overnight. Leadership demonstrated through visible costly actions is powerful.

The gunpowder company slowly grew into one of the largest industrial conglomerates in the world, DuPont. Its destiny would eventually cross mine two centuries later.

Even though I graduated as an automotive engineer, I never worked as one. On a hot summer day in which I was writing my final thesis, I received a call from who would become my first boss. He asked me to join his consulting team in Frankfurt, Germany. Excited and without knowing a single word of German, I accepted. I became an employee of DuPont .

While there, I learned a lot. At the time, DuPont was considered the leading world expert in Workplace Safety consulting. I had the chance to work with some of the top experts on this planet. I saw tens of companies: our clients. I learned from hundreds of managers, and thousands of workers. I listened to their words, their problems and their aspirations. I experienced their best practices. I analyzed failures. I came up with solutions. I followed their implementation. I internalized Operational Excellence.

A few years later, I left to start my own consulting practice. I spent some months reading as much as possible about Operational Excellence, learning as much as I could and talking with old experts and new clients. Then, I developed a framework to help any manager improving the Operational Culture of his company.

I now run my own consulting practice, helping managers (mostly in Europe and Asia) developing their employees and running their operations to the best of their potential.

However, helping managers one-by-one limits my leverage. I can only help so many people face-to-face. I needed to find a way to impact more people. Therefore, I decided to write this book.

This book is divided into three parts.

In the first part, you will learn the Four Principles of Operational Excellence to be leveraged in order to create an Operational Culture worth working in.

In the second part, I will detail the Eight Best Practices to transform the Four Principles into visible actions, which you can carry out starting today in your organization. I will provide detailed lists of steps and comprehensive examples to facilitate their execution.