Operational excellence is about doing everything needed to serve customers better and better. This is the way an organization generates customer loyalty over time and as a consequence will increase sales.
Attacking all the wastes in production processes and service activities: time waste, non-quality, unnecessary transportation and walk, simplifying everyone’s motion, implementing the appropriate leading indicators, the company builds more robust processes, capable of doing Right First Time. By doing so, the company gets engaged into a virtuous cost reduction, and as a consequence can make a better use of the available time to build capacity.
Sales growth as soon as the organization is engaged in this positive dynamic loop will substantially improve profitability.
This endless new logic, which consists in having the customer at the center of everything, and to continuously improve, is totally Leadership dependent. It depends of the ability of leaders to impulse and drive the program, to go see, to listen, to try to understand the problems and enable the organization to solve them, to make the right decisions, to be both patient and demanding, and to build the elements will make them credible. Leaders will build their legacy to the organization.