The oee approach
In response to the operational challenges facing the finance sector, oee has developed a structured approach to operations improvement. It has three core components:
- The appropriate adoption of best practice tools and techniques from industry
- The use of experienced operational improvement experts to work with our customers' teams
- Developing the capability and culture of our customers' operation to ensure sustainable improvements
Our aim is to work with customer teams to make them self sufficient in basic operations management practices. This is achieved by helping them understand and apply the key elements of the operations management tool kit. These elements are easily understood in principle, but often difficult to apply and make stick in practice.
oee helps an operation transform itself by applying proven operations management tools and techniques and prioritising these to start delivering benefit almost from day one. The approach involves:
- No capital investment required – IT or otherwise
- No major process redesign or re-engineering
- Using appropriate training materials to demonstrate the scale of the opportunity
- Clarification of front line manager role and assistance with developing key skills
- Giving managers a thorough grounding in key operational skills:
- Performance management
- Capacity planning
- Problem solving
- Process standardisation
- Coaching
- Closely supporting first line managers as they improve processes
- Making operational improvements ‘on the go’ and making them highly visible
- Doing operational improvement activities ‘with' front line teams not ‘to them’
- Making a clear distinction between value-added and non value-added work
- Demonstrating how service quality and efficiency should be measured in practice
- Embedding a Continuous Improvement (C.I.) culture into the team structure
- Getting front line teams to present achievements back to senior managers
Our experience tells us that a good grounding in core operations management skills is a building block for all other improvement initiatives, including for example, Lean and Six Sigma.
