By Willie Carter

Digital technologies can coexist alongside your process improvement and operational excellence strategy to help you to identify and remove waste from your existing processes, enabling you to do more with less.

Data collection and analysis has always been critically important for improving processes and decision making. The problem is what do you do with all the data you have collected/ how do you parse the data into meaningful metrics to help make improvements? Obstacles to process improvement and thus operational excellence, are largely due to the lack of metrics and the inability to measure them accurately. Digital technologies can help solve these issues to a large extent.

Some of these enabling technologies include cloud storage, Big Data as well as Analytics. Simply by moving data into the Cloud and making provisions for mobile access to it addresses the issues associated with the hoarding of data. Organizations are looking to employ a wide range of digital technologies that include the Internet as well as Industrial Internet of Things (IoT and IIoT), cloud computing, big data and analytics, etc.) to help achieve operational excellence.

Combining your process improvement /operational excellence strategy with digital technology can help increase business agility. This means that your speed of market readiness increases, employee productivity goes up, leaner processes can be put in place and you can maximize asset utilization. So, make your investment in the digital transformation payoff by employing the technologies to help improve your processes and achieve operational excellence.

Willie L. Carter is the President/CEO of Quantum Associates, Inc, an independent process improvement consultancy focused on enriching and providing value by removing waste from work processes. He has over four decades of experience helping organizations create value and is a Certified Lean Sensei, Certified Quality Improvement Facilitator, Certified ISO 9000 Lead Assessor, Certified Quality Professional and author of “Process Improvement for Administrative Departments – The Key to Internal Customer Satisfaction” available on Amazon.com.