When you are in the services business, you need the ability to consistently deliver to your customer’s expectations. You are constantly measured for quality, quick turn times and more extensively on our adherence to compliance, especially in the mortgage and title business. As an organization, to be able to achieve this consistently, you need a lot of commitment and investment in technology, training, process re-engineering, and process maturity. Collectively, all these efforts help to drive operational excellence.
What is Operational Excellence?
The Six Sigma concept defines Operational Excellence (OpEx) as an element of organizational leadership that stresses the application of a variety of principles, systems, and tools towards the sustainable improvement of key performance metrics. What it means is continuous up-gradation of organizational functioning through an ongoing improvement of problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership.
It must be noted that OpEx is not a set process but a change in outlook and approach. It involves the enhancement of business processes and culture for better execution of the business strategy and to exceed customer expectations. Things like consistent teamwork enabled by trust, technology, and process efficiency allow operating at low risk and help in minimizing operating costs.
“Companies in pursuit of operational excellence do two things significantly different than other companies: they manage their business and operational processes systematically and invest in developing the right culture.”
– BTOES (Business Transformation & Operational Excellence)
Across its operating teams, Fugo stresses operational excellence and has incorporated these 6 core principles within the organizational ecosystem.
- Client Centricity: The primary factor that drives operational excellence at Fugo is customer-centricity. Services provided by Fugo are delivered by mapping the process to match that of the established processes in the client’s organizations with improvements made only after approval. It is the adherence to this approach that helps in delivering to the customer needs with no complications and to the client’s satisfaction.
- Process Focus: Good execution often boils down to robust processes, rather than on employees alone. Consistent results depend on a well-defined process. At Fugo, the leadership team always emphasizes identifying the errors in a process and constantly improving it. When leaders focus on the process, they get to the root cause of what created the errors and focus on improving it. This also extends to ensuring the quality standards of the resources like information, materials, and equipment before incorporating them into the process.
- Technology-led: Operational Excellence at Fugo is made possible through technology inclusion. Innovation, experimentation, and constant updates are three aspects of technology-led operations. The key is to encourage the employees to do the same. This not only aligns the employees with the organization’s vision but also prepares them to embrace new technology easily.
- Transparency: Transparency isn’t easy, that too in an organizational structure where honest analysis of the situation and making it known to the employees may affect the balance. At Fugo, the aim is to create an environment built on trust, where all feedback be it positive or negative, is equally valued. It is a system that depends on acceptance and turning inputs into constructive solutions.
- Strong Team Collaboration: What’s an organization without a team? Fugo is a company that pays extra attention to team collaboration. This is made possible by orienting all employees towards the same goal. The individual sense of purpose clubbed with good communication drives team collaboration.
- Outcome-based Approach: All processes at the end focus on the outcome. The outcome-based approach is customer and result-oriented and focuses on what the customers need. All improvements in existing processes, new guidelines, employee training, etc. are made to achieve the best outcomes.
The principles help in building a system that is continuously improved to achieve operational excellence. Based on our own experience, here are some tested ways to achieve Operational Excellence.
- Introduce Employees to Operational Excellence: Start with getting the employees onboard. It is always important to make the employees understand the customer side and focus on how to keep adding value to the product or service provided. To achieve operational excellence, employees should understand the OpEx principles followed by the organization and also understand their role in making it possible. Begin with the concept before getting into processes or technology.
- Customer-facing Employees Empowered to Recognize and Respond to Interruptions in the Flow of Value: Understanding the workflow is important. But it begins with creating a standard workflow. Once a standard workflow is defined, create an abnormal flow to help the employees understand how to correct abnormal flow and to prevent future incidents themselves. The comparison between standard and abnormal is important for customer-facing employees to recognize and respond to interruptions inflow of value.
- Customer First Approach: Customers define what they want and what they can pay, which helps in determining the value addition to be provided. Operational Excellence depends on the refinement of processes and delivering value effectively and consistently to the customers. The approach hence must be directed towards gaining a deeper understanding of customers’ needs and expectations.
- Align Objectives, Metrics, and Accountability: Having a clear set of business objectives is a must, but what is equally important is the distillation within the entire organization. The objectives should be defined in such a way that every individual in the organization knows what is their contribution towards the goals. This would determine the performance evaluation metrics and the accountability of every individual.
At Fugo, we bring in Operational Excellence through customer focus, advanced order management to prevent any blockades and to deliver as per commitments. We ensure that there are zero surprises in delivery, which is enabled through technology, team collaboration, and active communication. We automate the delivery process with clear rules for allocation, escalation metrics, governance frameworks, availability checks, and even performance analysis. Operational Excellence at Fugo is not just a concept, but a commitment that we implement in everyday practice.
Do you require assistance with your Title Production or want to know more about Operational Excellence at Fugo? Your Texas-based back-office, Fugo is going to be at NS3 as a silver sponsor Let’s discuss at NS3. Schedule a meeting now.
