(600a) Key Opex Steps Necessary for Growth – Set Yourself up for Success

As a small or medium size firm, you have an entrepreneurial mindset and are experiencing or anticipating a step change in growth. Now is the time to establish operational excellence (OpEx) and continuous improvement programs, to help streamline and supercharge your operations. Leaders will want to establish strategies that revolve around fostering innovation, implementing operational excellence, and ensuring sustainable growth.

As companies identify and implement innovative technologies to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and drive growth, consideration must take place on standardizing across the platforms. This will enable collaboration between departments and organizations and drive efficiency. Equipment and process standardization can simplify work processes, reduce errors, and can also streamline some processes for business growth.

Development of high-performance work teams to manage and run your business will be needed, including anticipation for staffing for growth and engineering optimization. What are the proper staffing levels for growth, while maintaining a lean organization? How do you keep employees engaged and trained? What is the ideal technical career ladder for your business? These personnel elements are critical as you map out your business model for growth and ensure employees stay connected with industry trends and develop the expertise needed to drive innovation within the organization.

Selection of key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical to track performance, and employees must be fully trained to track and evaluate the data. Now is the time to establish KPIs, train personnel, and track and measure the impact of innovation initiatives on business performance. Regularly monitor progress, solicit feedback from stakeholders, and iterate on innovation strategies to ensure continuous improvement and sustained growth.

Many innovative technologies and entrepreneurs will not have the bandwidth to develop these systems on their own. This presentation will provide a high-level overview of the steps towards Operational Excellence and highlight what is critical to establish now as companies continue to grow. This sets up the company for success, cuts waste, boosts quality and performance along the way.