The Three Levels of Breakthrough: Business, Operations and Process
improve what you do not measure; identifying the various states of your business help you properly focus on what must be improved.
- Define what plans must be in place to realize improvement of each state. Creatively consider how to achieve a higher level of performance and relate those things to customer satisfaction.
-Measure the business systems that support the plans. Know what you need to measure and how to properly measure it, and get executive commitment to pursue the correct measurements.
-Analyze the gaps in system performance and benchmarks. Diagnose capability measures and assess performance gaps, through analyzing benchmarks and uncovering the “secrets” of how businesses operate at higher sigma levels.
-Improve system elements to achieve performance goals. Define your measuring system, collect the necessary data, analyze that data and prioritize your efforts for improvement.
-Control system-level characteristics that are critical to value. Monitor those efforts and their elements over a period of time, conducting regular “audits” of performance and controlling these critical-to-value characteristics.
-Standardize the systems that prove to be best-inclass. Compare the optimal performance of your business systems with similar examples elsewhere. When appropriate, apply these findings to other business units, capitalizing on the potential savings of your systemlevel analysis and control.
-Integrate best-in-class systems into the strategic planning framework. Roll the improvements out to all pertinent business units, folding these improvements into critical business strategies and tying the initiative to compensation as an incentive for full cooperation.
Operations Level
The Breakthrough Strategy helps expose “operational issues” for what they are: a collection of higher-level problems that become confounded. The Strategy helps break apart the “issue” into its components, allowing you to define problems, formulate plans and take positive actions. The Project Champion’s role in this effort is as follows:
- Recognize operational issues that link to key business systems. Often, the tactical solution to an operational issue is masked by the underlying support system. For example, imagine a company’s quality information system (QIS) which provides statistical data on product defects. The problem is that the defects are not identified