Are you ready for operational excellence?

A new order management system could transform the way you do business. But before you can achieve it, you need to clarify your aims. Let’s find out more.

Operational excellence. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? As the owner of a manufacturing company, it definitely sounds like something you should be aiming for. But how do you get there?

A critical part of achieving operational excellence is digitising and automating your processes and steps. An order management system (OMS) can help with this.

The development of your OMS should involve more than just the people in your sales team or warehouse. It can bring your entire organisation together, ensuring a seamless workflow from start to finish.

In this article, we’ll explore operational excellence and how it benefits your business. Then we’ll look at how you design your OMS to help you achieve it. Let’s get started.

What is operational excellence?

Operational excellence is the state of optimal performance across a company so it can hit its strategic goals. It requires two things to happen:

• Technical shift – Optimising your processes, often with technology
• Cultural change – Transforming how the people in your company work and think

Operational excellence isn’t something you can implement in just one department. Rather, it has to impact the entire organisation, keeping your customers’ demands front of mind at all times. Technology alone can’t fix a problem or take you towards operational excellence. You need all your people on the journey with you.

How operational excellence works for you

OK, so far, so good. But why should operational excellence matter to you in your manufacturing business?

The fact is, when you remove inefficiencies in your business, whether it’s with your processes or your people, you will experience several other benefits:

• Aligning your strategy and culture – Getting everyone pulling in the same direction eliminates departmental silos and encourages collaboration
• Better decision-making – When you optimise your processes, you can see what parts of your organisation would benefit most from technology
• Delighting your customers (and winning new ones) - When you put them at the heart of your business and align your strategy around their needs

The audit

The beauty of an OMS is that it brings in everyone from your Operations Director to the factory floor and customer services, impacting the entire way the company does business - for the better.

However, to make sure the OMS you select is the right one and does the right things for your unique business, it helps to clarify exactly what you need. Arrange a meeting with your Operations Director and go through the problems they would like to solve, the possible challenges ahead and the impact an OMS could make. You could call it your Operational Excellence audit.

Here are some of the questions you might like to sit down and ask your Operations Director:

• What’s working well for us right now?
• What’s holding us back?
• If we could change one thing about how things work right now, what would it be?
• If we could fast-forward 12 months, what would our ideal production process look like?
• Where could a new system really add value to our processes?
• What do we see as the hurdles we’ll need to overcome?
• How can we get our teams involved and bought in?
• What opportunities do we see ahead that we’d like to capitalise on but perhaps aren’t fully equipped to do so just yet?
• What is the most energy-consuming element of our production process?
• How would we like to save time and money in our production process?
• What other technology do we envisage bringing into the business? What key function will this perform?
• What’s our long-term vision for our order management system?
• Where do we want to be in the future?

We find these questions really help clarify what operational excellence means to a manufacturer, while helping influence a roadmap to get there.

Bringing it all together

These answers, along with others that we discover as we get to know your business, help us design the bespoke manufacturing software that gets you nearer to that all-important operational excellence before your competitors do.

To achieve operational excellence with an OMS, you need it to be:

• Customisable – Tailored to your specific business needs
• Scalable – With the ability to add new features and functionalities, your OMS can grow with your business
• Integrated – Your OMS should play nicely with your other business technologies, like your accounting software or CRM
• Efficient – Digital process automation software reduces errors, speeds up processing time and frees up your people to do what they do best
• Simple to use – The best OMS is designed for ease of use. And when things go wrong, you need the best support to solve your issue

At Flow56, we design made-to-order manufacturing software systems that tick all those boxes. To find out more, get in touch with us today.