Operational Excellence wants to provide an answer to these trends:
- Trend toward a “tailor-made industry”. The customer wants the perfect product modified to his/her specific needs. This results in an explosive increase in the number of products. This increasing complexity drives the manufacturing process to extremes.
- Trend toward quicker deliveries. Ordered today before 11 p.m., delivered to your home tomorrow. That is what our customer expects. But how do you do this without putting all your capital in stock or without causing production problems?
- Trend toward digitisation. Digital data capture is becoming “common practice”. Digitisation offers many opportunities to convert data into useful information better and quicker which we can use for more efficient and effective production.
- Trend toward sustainability. The customer also expects that the material and energy consumption has a smaller ecological footprint. And that principles such as cradle-to-cradle and corporate social responsibility are integrated in the operational management.
In addition, with the 7 Made Different transformations companies can also obtain the title of “Factory of the future”. These 2 approaches go hand in hand, just think of “smart production systems” or “human centered productions”.
But there are still differences. Whereas a Factory of the future invests in industry 4.0 and the required investments, OPEX focuses primarily on optimising the operational system. See also illustration 1.
We believe the trends will cause these 2 answers, Operational Excellence and Factory of the future, to grow toward each other. New business models and a new operational strategy will result from realisations in industry 4.0 or digitisation. And in this way Factory of the future will be a state of perfection for companies that aspire to Operational Excellence.
