Transcript

KATE BAILEY

My background in operations is working in manufacturing. So I have experience of working in both contract electronics for a global contracts electronics manufacturer, but I also work for Toyota as well. I now work in management consultancy. And I work with clients in the service sector, so retail, financial services. And I support clients in delivering better processes to meet their customer needs.

The work that I’m involved in is often where a client has a particular challenge. So for example, in retail, they may not be delivering on time to their particular customer. So often, they ask me to come in and help and understand what barriers they have in their operation in meeting what it is that their customer’s asking for.

Yes, I do see myself as an operations manager. I have to manage my own operation in delivering the service that the clients want from me.

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So the clients, they are often demanding. Often, they’ve got a very – or they’re at a crisis point, so they need to make real improvements to their business, because they’re failing to meet the demands of their customers, or they’ve got a serious problem that they’re trying to solve. So my job is, actually, to help them understand what that problem is, to work their way through that crisis, and actually allow them to deliver better operations to serve their customers better.

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First of all, we have to understand what the client’s problem is. So that will involve diagnostic – understanding their processes, understanding what’s happening in their particular operations, and what’s going wrong for them.

So my background is in lean thinking. So I use the lean framework, often, to diagnose problems. So often, this is actually just trying to understand the processes, what the actual processes are, what the inputs to those processes are, and whether those processes are performing.

So for example, if it’s they’re trying to deliver a service to the customer in a particular time, is that process actually delivering it in that time, on-time delivery. A lot of the time, we’re mapping out the process. We’re mapping out, what’s the inputs to that process, what’s actually going on in that particular process, and then what are the actual outcomes of that process? Is it delivering whatever’s needed for the customer?

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What I find is that the common mistakes in any operation is that they look at the financial outputs of the process. So they often look at how much money we’re making, what’s the revenue, or what’s the cost of the process, rather than actually looking at how well the actual process is actually performing. So it’s often looking at metrics which have passed, rather than looking at how the process is actually currently capable of delivering value.

Sometimes it’s even not measuring quality, or not really, sometimes, understanding what quality means for their particular operation. So often find, they don’t even have quality measures. So it’s really sometimes difficult to understand how well that process is actually delivering that quality if you don’t measure it.

So yeah, there is common mistakes around process design. Often, operations is overlooked in any organisation, and they expect the processes to, sometimes, emerge, rather than thinking strategically about how those processes should deliver the value to the customer, how they should be constructed.

A common mistake is, they’re not designing a process for the people who are actually going to deliver that process. And often, the processes can be overly complex or too administrative, and people often, then, find it very difficult to follow a particular process. And it’s then no surprise that the operation doesn’t meet its objectives.

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I support the idea that continuous improvement is absolutely vital for any operation today. The markets, whichever market you’re in – retail, financial services – all highly competitive markets. And the only way that you can actually keep ahead of your competitors is to continually improve. So any operations manager has to consider continuous improvement as a core part of their role.

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A day in the life of an operations manager in a service environment is very much around, what does the customer need on a day-to-day basis? So if you’re a manager of a contact centre, for example, you are ensuring that the calls are being answered in a timely manner, that the customers’ needs are being met, so whatever queries or questions that they have, that they are being answered successfully.

So on a day-to-day basis and on an hours-by-hour basis, there will be a set of metrics that they will be looking at. They’ll be looking at how many calls are coming in, how many calls have been answered, and the average time for those calls to be answered. And it’s trying to understand, in the hour-to-hour, what issues are actually rising, and how, then, can they fix them there and then to make sure that they continue to deliver the service to their customer.