Operational Excellence: The Most Celebrated Failure in Manufacturing
#OperationalExcellence #OPEX #PlantMaintenance #PlantOperations #LeanManufacturingIt’s not about colourful charts or an annual award. It’s about how factories behave when no one’s watching.
May 2025 : Let’s call it out.
Operational Excellence (OPEX) is the most overpromised and underdelivered program in manufacturing history. Everyone claims to have it. Few can prove it. It’s like a target timeline, visible only in PowerPoint.
Plants still deal with the same old mess: reactive maintenance, inconsistent quality, daily production drama, and people playing KPI musical chairs. And yet, the banners scream: “We are a Lean Organisation.”
So why does it fail?
The Silent Killers of OPEX (That Generally, Your Dashboard Doesn’t Track)
1. Pretend Alignment
People smile in reviews, agree to action plans, and then go back to doing things the way they have always done. Transformation ends where chai break begins.
2. PowerPoint Overdosing
OPEX lives in slides, not shifts. Leaders present transformations, but no one on the floor knows what changed, except the background colour of the daily board.
3. Rituals Without Rhythm
Machines break, people scramble, production limps, someone gets blamed. Rinse, repeat. Excellence becomes a weekend hobby, until Monday morning hits.
4. Firefighting is the Default Mode
Daily meetings happen. KPIs are reviewed. But there's no pulse. Reviews feel like reading a cheap detective novel—predictable, vague, and oddly optimistic.
5. Too Much Tech, Too Little Thinking
There’s a new dashboard every month. Sensors on everything. But no one knows what’s actionable. Data is abundant. Decisions? Not so much.
6. The Middle Layer Black Hole
Supervisors are the glue. But they are often burnt out, buried in WhatsApp groups, and surviving by instinct. They aren’t managing—just absorbing shocks.
The Fix: Uncommon, Uncomfortable, Unignorable
1. Focus on One Pain Point, Ruthlessly
Instead of chasing 99 problems, go after the one that’s bleeding margin. Fix it end-to-end. Then scale the method, not the madness.
2. Redesign Micro-Behaviours
OPEX success isn’t in new SOPs—it’s in how people talk during shift handovers, how operators react to a stoppage, and how quickly leaders act on bad news. Engineer moments, not manuals.
3. Build a “Loss Twin”
Model where time, efficiency, or sanity leaks—real-time. Not just OEE. Capture cognitive overload, downtime wait time, and decision delay. When teams see waste, they fight it.
4. Inject Short Interval Management (SIM)
Move from daily reviews to 2–3 hour control checks. SIM helps catch small deviations before they snowball. Think of it as heartbeat monitoring, before the heart attack.
5. Run Chaos Drills for Supervisors
Forget training rooms. Throw real-world curveballs: machine jams, operator no-shows, supply hiccups. Build response reflexes. They don’t need theory—they need a cockpit.
6. Create a “Line CEO” System
Give supervisors full visibility and limited autonomy—just enough to drive decisions, but not derail them. Let them run their line like a mini-business. Skin in the game works wonders.
7. Make Dashboards Boring and Conversations Smart
Design dashboards that say just one thing: “What do I need to fix now?” Then build a culture where asking hard questions is safer than avoiding them.
The Last Word (and a Sharp One)
Operational Excellence doesn’t die from lack of tools. It dies from lack of truth.
It’s not about colourful charts or an annual award. It’s about how factories behave when no one’s watching.
So, next time someone says, “We’re doing Lean,” ask: “Lean… or just lean-ing on old habits with new jargon?”
Anirban Chatterjee, Partner, ansoim
Over the past 20+ years, Anirban Chatterjee has successfully completed over 110+
Operational Transformation engagements spanning 26 diverse industries, working with both
small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as Fortune 500 companies.
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