September 28 – 30, 2015
San Francisco, California
www.businessperformanceexcellencesummit.com
Driving Strategic Business Performance
through Operational Excellence
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Editor’s Note
Ensuring OpEx is in tune with
Business Objectives
Linking your Operations to
your Company Strategy
Getting the Strategy Right
Should Strategy Drive
Operational Excellence – or
Vice Versa?
Business Performance
Excellence Summit
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Taking the right path to performance excellence requires executives to link
processes to company strategy. Without this alignment, you will struggle with
engagement, lack focus and won’t reach your full potential.
Ahead of the Business Performance Excellence Summit in San Francisco, CA,
which will help you get aligned and link your transformation efforts to business
strategy, we’ve put this report together to create a clearer path for you to achieve
enterprise operational excellence.
The importance of aligning operational excellence with strategy is critical, and the possible
consequences of neglecting this vital task can never be underestimated. Executives are
constantly looking to successfully execute on large-scale change initiatives and learn how to
identify the root causes behind process inefficiency, including issues of strategy and
operating models.
Executives want to make their
transformations a fluid and ongoing
part of their business model,
focusing on the intersection of
processes, tools and people.
Business process is a logical link
between business strategy,
business model and day-to-day
operations. Process culture is a
manifestation of employee
behaviour, attitude and practices
that drive the activities they
perform on a day-to-day basis
to impact the strategic objectives positively on a consistent basis.
Translating strategic intent into execution is the key objective of developing a process culture.
Process culture brings the much-needed discipline and rigor to ensure firms stay on track and
employees do not take the easy way out but follow the standard path optimized for that business.
Jason McGee-Abe
Editor, PEX Network
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Should Strategy Drive Operational
Excellence – or Vice Versa?
At Marsh, Angie Kennard, Senior Vice President of Operations,
says: “Company strategy must be defined first. All cross-functional
strategies (sales/transformation strategies etc. must coincide with
the fundamental strategy). All strategy must be aligned with our
five-year transformation policy.”
To leverage strategy internally, Marsh looks deeply at client needs,
product development and growth needs for the business.
Marsh’s ability to maintain financial performance and show
shareholder value clearly helps to drive its large-scale
transformation and improvements throughout the business.
Marsh has been on its transformation journey for at least 10 years.
However, over the past 4 years, “we’ve started a large-scale
initiative across the firm. But there’s always a need for process
business improvement,” adds Angie Kennard.
Angie Kennard, Senior Vice President,
Operations, Marsh
CASE STUDY PRESENTER:
“Making BPM success happen: Enhancing
process visibility, data capture and control and
workflow management”
[Conference Day One, 2:00pm]
“There’s always a
need for process
business improvement”
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Ensuring OpEx is in tune with Business
Objectives
Ignore operational excellence at your peril. Ensuring that OpEx
is in tune with business objectives is key to success. Russell
Danziger, Senior Vice President, Global Project Management
Office, Guy Carpenter, says that a lot of programmes have
“derailed because they don’t start with a high-level strategy”.
He adds: “Where they don’t have the right people involved in the
strategy discussion. It’s not so much about executing your
strategy, unless you’re a pretty senior person in the organisation
who’s actually setting the strategy, but you really need to be in
tune with what the strategy is, and be able to synthesize that
down to something that actually could be operationalised to
deliver against that strategy.”
Organizations expend much time, money, and effort in a bid to
improve their business processes, but these efforts can be met
with less than desirable results if a few key issues aren’t
considered right from the start. There are a multitude of reasons
that process improvement can fail to meet objectives - including
underestimating the difficulty of sustaining the changes,
inadequate or inappropriate communication between teams, not
involving the right staff in the change - but the pitfalls are
predictable and easy to avoid once you learn to recognize them.
A key point evolves the alignment between business strategies
and business-transformation initiatives, but it does, however,
really depend on the organization.
“Aligning operations to strategy is very different than aligning
operational excellence to strategy. I mean, they both should be
done, they’re both starting from the same place – which is: know
what your strategy is, in a pretty deep way, and understand how
everything, impacts that”, says Guy Carpenter’s Russell
Danziger.
Russell Danziger, Senior Vice President, Global
Project Management Office, Guy Carpenter
PANELIST:
“System-wide process governance: How to
govern an OE program across multiple
business entities, departments and
geographies”
[Conference Day One, 10:45am]
PANELIST:
“Striking a balance: Encouraging innovation to
create a pull for improvement while driving
change”
[Conference Day Two, 1:30pm]
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Getting buy-in from people from a mind-set point of
view can also be a key challenge within
organizations when trying to implement an
operational excellence transformation program.
You might have to effectively work with your
employees and in part do some sales and get
people to want to actually want do operational
excellence. There are too many people that take
the stance, “You know your area best and where
the problems are, so you’re in charge of finding
areas to change”.
We all constantly struggle to get rid of silos in our
own organizations and this mindset needs to
change. Including everyone and being
collaborative on the journey of change can
instigate new and refreshing perspectives to spot
deficiencies and ultimately improve your
operations.
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Linking your Operations to your
Company Strategy
Market dynamics are requiring organizations to do a lot more
with less, particularly with domestic and global competition, and
with consumer demand for lower cost, higher quality
experiences, organizations are being motivated to streamline
processes and become more consumer-centric.
The continued growth of technology, as the default for consumer
interaction, is requiring businesses to also create processes
which are adaptable, enabling organizations to provide
information in real-time.
Leaders need to lead, align and cascade operational excellence
into their organizations. Understanding the role of leadership in
operational excellence is imperative and identifying the key
management hurdles and beliefs that can prevent improvement.
Understanding processes in the context of strategic and
financial imperatives can help to drive strategic business
performance through operational excellence and identifying the
root causes behind process inefficiency, including issues of
strategy and operating models.
Taking business transformation to the next level requires
moving BI governance and development out of functional silos
and into a centralized and recognized forum. In 2010, Anthem
made the move to centralize its business improvement team to
serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders across the
enterprise by improving and objectively solving complex, cross-
cutting challenges; executing strategy and implementing high
priority initiatives; and building new business and cultural
capabilities to achieve Anthem’s vision, values, and objectives.
Steve Jenkins, Staff Vice President, Business
Improvement Group, Anthem
KEYNOTE PANEL:
“Securing executive sponsorship and linking
your operations to company strategy”
[Conference Day One, 8.45am]
CASE STUDY PRESENTER:
“Establishing a Center of Excellence: Getting
better at getting better”
[Conference Day One, 4.15pm]
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Exactly five years ago, Anthem
recognized that there was a need for the
organization to change its strategy, says
Steve Jenkins, Staff Vice President,
Business Improvement Group, at
Anthem: “We reviewed the business and
focused specifically on cross-functional,
large-scale transformation initiatives. We
introduced a matrix organization to
address the heavily siloed mentality. We
looked horizontally across the business
and brought their tools to help us
transform our business processes for the
larger needs of the organization, not just
one area of the business.”
For 2016, Anthem has made it clear that
no product will get funding unless it’s
tightly aligned to one of our three
strategic pillars. Steve Jenkins adds: “We
help to translate this to business owners
to show how impacts those overarching
pillars. It’s critical.”
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You need to take off your
departmental hat and put the
enterprise hat on as if you were
the CEO or CIO making the tough
decisions.
Communication and collaboration
is vital and making sure the
leaders are all connected can
assist in operationalizing your
business performance. Rolling out
programs need to be highly
transparent and continuous touch
points further equip managers with
the right tools to clearly
communicate strategy across the
operations.
Getting the
Strategy Right
PANELIST:
“Implementing changes in leadership thinking and behaviors
to effectively embrace and support organizational
transformation”
[Conference Day One, 1:15pm]
PANELIST:
“Striking a balance: Encouraging innovation to create a pull
for improvement while driving change”
[Conference Day Two, 1:30pm]
Before stepping down from his post as CIO of Walgreens, Tim Theriault said in a Forbes interview
on the topic of how to approach change and innovation: “We engage our colleagues globally to
identify innovative ideas to exploit and develop.”
Now this is a very popular notion, that strategy is about a strong vision for the future and that what
is getting in the way of reaching this strategy is poor implementation. It’s common to cite the
statistic that 70 per cent of change initiatives fail, as if the chief executives have the ability to
forecast the future. The idea that success will go to those who see it first.
However, operationalizing business performance and driving strategic business performance
through operational excellence will assist executives to align strategy with operations, determine a
clear path between process and value and achieve success.
Naz Saleem, Divisional
Vice President, Continuous
Improvement and
Corporate Innovation,
Walgreens
By creating a unified vision and culture of operational
excellence will help organizations to effectively embrace
and support organizational transformation whilst driving
change.
Executives need to take corrective action now to improve
areas of operational weakness, and take decisive action
to implement enterprise transformation initiatives with
speed and certainty.
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Where operational excellence and business transformation executives meet to execute on
strategy and deliver substantial improvements in business performance
September 28 – 30, 2015 Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf,
San Francisco, California