What is the need?
The shared pains are evident everywhere in all size of operations. Pressure for profits, high cost, improving the production and delivery efficiency, optimization of assets, efficient cycle time, increasing customer value etc has becoming a routine echoes across the organizations. The focus of operational innovation becomes even more important because it provides a collaborative environments which helps in generating diverse possibilities. In operational innovation you focus on the existing operations and the companies mostly have their improved alternatives (vaguely) to further enhance upon as compared to green field innovation where you need to have lot more unknowns.
If applied efficiently BPM Innovation framework can completely elevate the organization’s process efficiency. Operational innovation in business process management has been the key focus for some of the flagships companies. WalMart growth story is not hidden. It has pioneered the operational innovation in its logistics processes and acquired the faster growth through operational efficiency. The cross docking process where utilized to move the goods from supplier’s truck directly on to the truck which moved to stores reducing the inventory levels and lowing the overall logistics cost. This enabled Walmart to provide the products at lower cost to its customers as compared to its competitors. There is no doubt that operational innovation contributed significantly to the WalMart success. The business strategy, HR and operation methods contributed immensely to create a innovation thought pattern which contributed significantly in imbibing the operational innovation culture into business process. The traditional theories being ignored in thinking loud and its efficient implementation certainly paid off well.
BPM with Operational Innovation
In-house innovation and operational capabilities have more insightful growth. Various companies continuously try to evolve the existing processes and promote operational innovation by several unstructured methods. The ground rules off course lies in encouraging employees to utilize not only existing operational abilities but also in rewarding efforts to entirely change the operational methods which defy the conventional theories. But developing this culture requires immense persistence in understanding and inclination to develop the innovation culture in the operational activities. The task becomes even more complex because it requires assimilation of various conflicting interests and employees conditioning behaviors. Now with all these common challenges which organizations faced, BPM innovation framework provides a structured grounding methods which apply operational innovation and develop a culture to continuously analyze and evolve a collective operational efficiency. The aim here is not to gain process improvement or process excellence within the existing models but to drive towards finding an entirely new and much efficient ways of doing certain activities.
BPM
Various theories has proved that radical change in the organizations requires intense judgment in improving the existing ways of doing operational activities. The assimilation of technologies paved the ways for wider coverage and better efficiency in gaining a holistic growth. Business Process Management (BPM) helps in better collaboration with various stakeholders to gain a improved level of process management and reformation. It provides a common platform across the organization which helps in managing the crucial processes with more transparency and organization wide collaboration in managing business process managements and improvements. The enterprise centric design platform provide an unified process base which helps in optimizing process performance and availability to critical users in proving valuable inputs in reaching an elevated level of operational activities.
Operational Innovation
..radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic
improvements in performance … not to automate an existing process but to enable
a new one (Hammer 1990, p. 108).
The core factors of operational innovation are reflected much before by one of the pioneer of the Business process Re-engineering (BPR) professor Michael Martin Hammer. In one of the HBR article he mentioned that “Breakthrough innovations in operations—not just steady improvement—can destroy competitors and shake up industries. Such advances don’t have to be as rare as they are”. The reflection of this fact is yet to realize the changes in the operational innovation to accelerate the growth beyond the traditional re engineering methods. This will enable organizations to orchestrate the data transformations and continuously provide a platform within the organizations to rise within matured environment and gain full operational efficiency.
Many examples are evident in organizations where process improvements confused with the process innovations. The problem lies in the organization hierarchical positioning where decision makers unable to reflect the depthness because of their rise in hierarchy muted through various non operational channels. It is imperative and required to gain apt culture for operational innovation to empower the creative operational efficiency and create a process innovation team. Inclusion of strong innovative operational voices in decision making should powerful enough to create the impact in decision makings. A multi dimensional operational excellence team can bring forward the process challenges which can systematically gather information, collaborate and also own the prototyping and create awareness within various stack holders. Immense deliberation and commitment is required from the organizations to develop systematic operational innovation framework to get the critical issues reaching the radius of operational innovation framework.
The importance of collaboration is immense in achieving something unique. The great ever naturalist and philosopher Charles Darwin once wrote “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”. If managed efficiently, collaboration throws the possibility to bring multi-dimensional thoughts which brings very unique results. The collaboration within operational innovation framework brings the very first stage of amalgamation of diverse ideas from entirely different directions. It provides the operational excellence team a platform to discuss the ideas and express the thoughts which can be channelized to advance operational efficiency. The multi-disciplinary team forms an operational excellence cohesiveness which can continuously collaborate and work within organization and bring unique ideas to the table, provide inputs and find the unique ways to take the operational excellence at different level. The high power collaborative team should be efficient enough to extract the intuitive and cognitive behavioral mixes and carve out a direction to the brainstorming sessions. The understanding of behavioral aspects can simply not being ignored. The efficient handling of collaborative stage is required to have a structured method to manage the conscious and unconscious thoughts of team members to open the ideas for identifying unique perspective.
The purpose of Operational Excellence team is to raising creativity and search for the “wow” factor/s which can be modeled and carve out direction/s for operational innovations. Once the process triggers are identified, the team will require elaborating the issues and defining the different perspectives while developing the new process value. At this point it is required to capture the need and also the inherent benefits from the existing process.
Continuous operational innovation occurs in a organization which has higher level of commitments from the top executives. Many senior management staff lacks the touch with shop floor operational activities which can provide the valuable inputs in bringing operational excellence. Management isolation, operational conditioning, lack of vision and commitments can be averse to operational innovations. What are the reason that some company continuously reinvent their operational efficiency and stay ahead in creating organic growth. There are some patterns which can be attributed to achieve efficiency with continuous operational innovations.