Two weeks I had the privilege of giving a keynote presentation during a company leadership event in Ghent, Belgium. They (
Ajinomoto Omnichem
) realised that they needed to double down on operational excellence if they wanted to be able to meet the growth targets that they had put on themselves. At the end of the presentation, during the Q&A, a bright lady asked the question how to handle the assignment of responsibility (or ownership) on end to end processes. Needless to say that processes play a vital role in operational excellence and it was a very thoughtful question.
Last week I also had the honour to deliver the opening keynote during the
Automation Summit
2025 in Split, Croatia and during many of the excellent other presentations I noticed the link between processes, excellence and automation. So, in this week’s post I would like to revisit the connection between operational excellence and BPM.
Since I’ve went over the definition of BPM many times, let me start with the definition of Operational Excellence:
“the systematic implementation of principles and tools designed to enhance organisational performance, and create a culture focused on continuous improvement”.
A couple of things stand out from this definition: first and foremost it deals with two major outcomes: organisational performance and a culture of continuous improvement. The latter being absolutely the most difficult but also most rewarding objective.
Furthermore, within Operational Excellence 10 core principles have been defined and some of them are clearly linked to business processes. Think about:
Focus on the process
Seek perfection (or in this case: completeness)
Assure quality at the source (alignment on paper before implementation)
Think systematically (structured processes and ownership)
Now, the definition of BPM tells us that this is the art and science of overseeing how work is performed in an organisation to ensure consistent outcomes and to take advantage of improvement opportunities. It’s easy to see that both philosophies aim at improving the performance of an organisation and where Operational Excellence focuses on both the tools & principles and the required culture, BPM focuses primarily on enabling the organisation to be aligned optimally and have structures in place to create and maintain the momentum around business processes in combination with continuous improvement.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here, the main benefit of BPM (i.e. having a single source of truth) is not to have process models (they are a basic hygiene factor) but to be able to swiftly and accurately determine and manage the impact of a change before it manifests itself.
All of the efforts done in Operational Excellence often result in functional change requests (I.e. you want to improve a process or a part of a process, which is supported by an application, executed by a responsible role and using inputs and generating outputs) and these change requests need to be assessed for impact, validated, designed, built and deployed….. and updated in the documentation.
Not too difficult to see the incredibly close connection between the principles of Operational Excellence and Business Process Management.
If you now add Automation into the mix and it’s definition of creating systems that can operate independently, executing tasks with precision and speed that often exceeds human capabilities, you can easily understand that BPM acts as the foundation by providing a single source of truth (including procedures to keep it up to date), and operational excellence provides the framework and tools to continually improve your processes, then automation is one of a set of very powerful tools to increase the performance even further.
However, without the BPM foundation and the Operational Excellence mindset, automation will result in the same underperformance, only quicker and perhaps cheaper.
Just some food for thought….
To be continued…
Caspar